Submariner Poetry Series: Existence is Futile

by Anonymous Submariner

Follow me, I don’t know where I’m going.
Far from here, I travel not knowing,
My destination, I’m caught in the fray,
In one never-ending hellish day.
 

Existence is futile,
I live without fear.
Whatever’s beyond,
Must be better than here.

Unaware of a purpose,
And ignorant of an answer.
I grow restless,
My hate spreads like a cancer.
 

What’s the meaning?
Why was I born into this dismal existence?
Why must I endure such abysmal conditions?
 

Is it a test?
Lest I fail, shall I die?
Die without knowing and always wondering why?
Why was I a participant in such an evil conception?
Forced to play in this drama amidst my every objection?

But who am I to say?
Were I to say it,
Who would hear?
Would my words fall without notice,
Upon a deaf and careless ear?

But, what if someone were to listen?
And my words not fall astray?
What then would I tell them?
What would my mouth allow me to say?
 

~Submariner

(Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean)

This poem and others like it were written over the course of many watches in Engine Room Lower Level while stationed aboard the USS Georgia (SSBN-729) as a Nuclear Mechanic. Being out at sea, underway, away from every distraction experience on land, with nothing but your job to do on the ship… it allows a lot of time for the mind to wander. A lot of room for self-examination and reflection. Hours upon hours, spent in isolation, day after day, maintaining the watch station and taking logs on the top of every hour for 6 hours out of every 18-hour day we had out at sea.

To many, this might seem awful. To be so isolated, and ultimately trapped inside of your head with your own thoughts. For no other publications or distracting media was allowed in the Engine Room, only Steam Plant Manuals and Reactor Plant Manuals were allowed as reading material and after reading through all of those until set-points, casualty procedures, and diagrams are ingrained in the memory to the extent you could react to any situation exactly as the manual dictates in order to save the ship and the 160 souls aboard.

Once to that point of knowledge saturation, the time for thinking, the opportunity for complete isolation arises and ultimately becomes yearned for… at least in my case. Sometimes I couldn’t wait to get back to the deepest reaches of the engine room, away from everything, and dive back inside of my head to hash through what had started 12 hours ago and continue to explore these thoughts and bring them out of my head and onto paper. Thoughts that for me, came out in this poetic form, written and rewritten until it accurately reflected what was deep inside of me.

As it happens, I’ve only ever been able to write while underway, in the deep isolating bowels of the sub, hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, away from all of life’s distractions. It makes me wonder what’s deep inside of me right now, approaching a few decades since I wrote poems like this, and I haven’t had the opportunity to reach back in as life has evolved at a feverish pace and never seems to let up.

What am I missing? What part of me is dormant and asleep? What if it wakes up? Sometimes it scares me, as I know the thoughts that emerged when I had the time to dive in, weren’t exactly pleasant and sometimes even troubling to me. What if they wake up now? What happens then?