Wandering Thoughts

Wandering Thoughts is a trilogy of poems and monologues by Paul Alexander Baylor.
It consists of:
* Wandering Thoughts Book One: Thoughts Unbound
* Wandering Thoughts Book Two: Into The Light
* Wandering Thoughts Book Three: Strangeness
The works of Paul Alexander Baylor have become quite well known in certain circles over the last few years. This could well be due to the fact that he has fully embraced the phenomenon of electronic books. Most of his works have been published first via eBooks before becoming traditional paper books, his trilogy of poems and monologues Wandering Thoughts has been a success and can be downloaded from many sites.
His monologue ("A Tale Of Death And Rebirth") from the first of these books, Dark Thoughts, is powerful and full of fear and hatred, yet also shows the ability of man to conquer adversity yet become evil in doing so.

Every family has been struck,
The Isle is stunned,
It is too shocked to react,
Help is not forthcoming from the outside world.

A poignant point on how the entire nation starts its fall into evil, where goodness is rejected on a national scale for anyone outside their own borders. Like the phoenix the nation rises once more, but it rises in a way that promotes destruction for the world.

They do not forget,
Nor do they forgive the people of the outside world,
They build and fortify for revenge,
They become feared and hated once more,
Even more than before,
For the Isle is strong and united,

These baleful lines, showing the rebirth of a nation into darkness, shows how a sociological imperative for xenophobia can get out of hand, it harkens back to the days of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco and sends shivers down the spine as one remembers what happened then and what could happen now with our advanced technology.
Yet later on in the book in the poem called ‘War’ he shows his horror of the destruction that can happen in a war,

War, war, war,
Death, dismemberment, destruction,
A screaming boy child,
Dying in the mud,

Epitomising the fact that most soldiers who die in wars are nothing more than children, a society wide acceptance of child sacrifice on the altar of politics. Again in another from this section of the book ‘Suicide, The Only Gift That Matters’ he states poignantly

A slowing dying body,
A mind that weakens and finally,
In that not now so distant future,
Loses its grip on reality,
What have I to live for now,
At the beginning of my extreme old age,

He promotes death and destruction throughout this section, but in such a way that consequences are also shown raising doubts as to just what he is trying to pass on to the reader. Or is it the confusion about these things the very things that he wishes his reader to think about? Is he promoting that all actions have consequences? Or that people should learn to think for themselves and not allow the politician to do their thinking for them?
In the second section of the first book in ‘Loneliness’ he graphically portrays life in a city,

They are in a city of millions,
Yet they are imprisoned,
Imprisoned by a wall,
A wall of indifference and silence,

The condemnation of western society and its inability to protect the weak in its own society comes through in this section powerfully. The fact that, on the whole, the west has stepped away from familial loyalty and protection to allowing the state to take over this role and imperfectly doing so comes out strongly in ‘The Depressed’:

My feelings are dead,
For the moment at least,
Soon I hope,
I will welcome them again,

Although never mentioning outright western society, the great malignancy that has millions in the west suffering from ‘depression’ is once more a condemnation of the state taking over the management of almost every aspect of our lives.
Each of the three books define an area of interest, the first goes primarily for the depressive nature of the human soul, it feelings of loneliness and despair, the second goes forward by trying to show hope and the desire for human contact throughout the section and finally the third takes the idea of the soul into consideration and that that all living things have them, from the robin to the tree. Each in its own way brings forth an aspect of the human being, the darkness and the light.

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