Day 50 - 19th Feb
FIFTY DAYS AT SEA
To walk back
up the hill
past their hushed stares.
From the cobh
to the house again.
Dank and less than its neighbours.
Not even a sea view.
With splinters from the wreckage bleeding in shins.
Salty devastation;
Eye socket smashed swollen shut
against the bow.
Collapse now
onto unmade bed
(shocked to have you back so soon)
that now has no room
and seems too small
like a halfling’s.
Shivering with the wet
the outside wet now soaking into the mattress.
Not yet warm enough to cry, or even
wonder why
or know why.
Sleep is foreign.
The voyager returned.
Skulking about his too-small house in his sea-shrunk clothes.
Pottering about in his tea-stained, too-big kitchen
aching for the galley
with no notion
of how to make house.
For a house is not a ship
and so refuses to be made shipshape.
This is fair. This is part of it.
The old oak kitchen table is the only place for you now.
Can hold your ambition, your logic and your superstition.
Takes the elbows and does not hurt them, but does not crumple.
A stiff drink and a loose think. And the sea legs disappearing
bloody shins with them.
As you make your supper, the plan will emerge
a circumnavigation! Will be urged
and you will set out,
bright as a button the next morning
into the town.
Cheer-faced and returned
(the tan is real enough).
Townsfolk will ask what went wrong, those that dream beyond the reef
but most won’t give a shit.
Why should they?
As you set craft out now, to learn the reef, to swim in it
to freedive down,
you will see how and where and what and why you almost drowned
and the exact spot you ran aground
in the sound
beyond the cobh.
And the winds will be fair and good enough and you can
play the captain,
and arrive in many a port
make many a story
seek many a glory
tell many a Jackanory
under the known light of the hearth.
The landlord will love you,
for you bring tales of the archipelago
which are true enough - and needed.
Take things back and fro and carve out, on your kitchen table
a map of the place. To be consulted at and looked upon
with stern face
and mug of steaming tea,
the captain and his soliloquy.
Then one time you will go to the hearth of a distant tavern
on a far-flung rock
a stepping stone to nowhere
and you will go outside to piss on the gable wall
and in the half-light and moonlight you will look up drunk and see it all.
And off onto the pebble beach you will see him.
A silhouette
Mending a net
and you won’t know how, but
you will find a way to him.
and he is not impressed.
‘A hard going I had of it to get here’
“Down the beach.”
he says.
‘There is nothing down that end’,
only the end - nothing beyond but nonsense and turmoil’.
“Down the beach”, he says.
And off you will walk.
The pebbles get bigger
from peas to potatoes
graded by the tide.
And there she is—
a seafaring vessel
and a sea
Wide. Empty, reefless.
Climb aboard and not to the
bow.
But below.
Fall back on a hammock.
For he is the captain.
You hear him above and through the hatch the captain says:
“Find the way for us now, Wayfinder”.
You close your eyes and dream
and in these dreams
let go of the end.
Niall Campbell
On the first of January, I started shipping a piece of artistic content every day. I had no grand plan, no vision—just the recognition that I was creatively blocked and the resolve to do something about it. To buy myself time, I polished off three or four old poems and posted them. Then, the rest started to come.
Today marks day fifty. Fifty poems, fifty essays, all done in the margins of life with a newborn daughter in the house. No time for pretence, no luxury of waiting for inspiration—just a ten-minute timer and the need to write a fucking poem. It worked.
If you want to get creatively unblocked, just start. Stop theorising. Stop making space for it. Don’t wait for the muse. Set a timer and write. You’ll look back, as I do now, and realise—with a pang of grief—that you should have begun years ago.
I had, of course, written before. Anyone who works with words probably has a few poems stashed away, the way people keep foreign coins in a drawer—useless, forgotten, but hard to throw out. Most will never see the light of day.
This is how it goes. Nature abhors a vacuum, and into the void where unfinished poetry and prose and dance and all the rest it should go, flow two kinds of people. The first are the ones whose genius cannot be contained—raw talent that burns too bright to be ignored. They are the numerator of the fraction. I call them the ‘Bowies’. they are as rare as snow leopards. The denominator are the audacious ones. I call them the “Brents’. The delusional ones. those with no reasonable doubt about their own brilliance, and seemingly no insight into their own mediocrity. I am certainly not the former. I am willing to be the latter if it means the work gets out of me and into the world.
If you’ve ever found yourself getting cynical—if you’ve ever seen some lazy, self-indulgent piece of work and thought, I could do better than that—then you already know what this is. It’s a call to adventure.
I know that cynicism well. For years, my critiques of shitty art were just the bitterness of a self-crippled child looking out of the window while the other kids played outside. A child who had, somewhere along the way, turned sour about it.
So if you feel activated—if my poems annoy you, if my essays seem like self-indulgent guff—then good. That’s your signal. Make your play. Put your own work out into the world. Because the recalibration of what is good, what is worthy, what is necessary—that's in your hands - no more or less than the next person. You don’t get to complain about the state of things if you aren’t actively redressing the balance.
The poem that ends this stretch of fifty days came from an image—one that arose while talking to a client. A man torn between security and adventure. A common enough conflict, and yet ancient.
His story was my story, and yours too, I’d wager.
The image was of a sailor, skilled enough to navigate treacherous waters, mastering the reefs and currents around the archipelago. But there comes a point where the real fear isn’t about getting better at island-hopping. The real fear is the decision—at long last—to leave the islands behind and make for the open sea.
This is a motif older than writing. The climber who moves past the ridgeline, where there’s no way down except forward. The sailor who stares out beyond the last atoll. The moment where skill is no longer enough, and instinct—pure, heart-led intuition—must take over.
And it is at that threshold that so many falter.
Because you cannot navigate this next step with the tools of your parents. Their methods got you this far, but beyond the reef, you must return to something older, deeper—ancestral knowledge, buried wisdom.
I have been reading about the Wayfinders—the Polynesian navigators who crossed vast distances without maps or instruments. They read the stars, the birds, the shape of the waves. They felt their way forward. This wasn’t an airy fairy side show. The survival of the tribe was dependant upon them properly leveraging this gestalt technology.
A Wayfinder is not a captain. A captain is subsumed within the title of Wayfinder. A captain manages the known. A Wayfinder steps beyond it.
And when you reach the edge of the map—where the old cartographers wrote Here Be Monsters—you must understand:
The Krakens are of your own making.
And when you sail past the edge of the map?
You find there was no edge at all.
Just more sea.
And another, bigger archipelago.
So go.
Show us the way, Wayfinder.