Do you know?

Do you know?

Do you know who I am?

I don’t think you do

Do you know that I love Elvis?

And I adore the Beatles too

Do you know those little details that make me who I am?

At times I give up and I just don’t give a damn

Do you know I love the ocean and the sound of the waves?

And having my toes in the sand on warm sunny days

Tell me, do you know what I’ve lived through and how I’ve survived?

And the things I’ve had to deal with, and the times I’ve lied

Do you know from time to time I hide a tear and fake a smile?

Because I know time can heal the pain, it’ll just take a while

Do you know I often cry?

I also hate saying goodbye

Do you know that the gentle sound of a guitar soothes me?

And when the man with the loving voice sings, it moves me

But how could you ever know what it is like to be me?

You claim to know who I am, but it cannot be

Because some knowledge simply cannot be grasped

And what I know and believe is determined by my past

  Kristina G

I wrote the poem ‘Do you know?’ one day when I was thinking about people’s interactions with one another and how sometimes people jump to conclusions about other people without really knowing their story. I think in a way it might relate to Theory of Knowledge because it led me to thinking about whether or not you could ever say you really ‘know’ someone or how they are feeling. Sometimes people say, “I know exactly how you feel” but do they really? I don’t think it is possible to say that you know how another person is feeling because you can never know what it’s like being that person and you can never know what they’ve been through or their perspective on life. How can you say that you ‘KNOW’ someone? What is this knowledge based on? The feeling of knowing someone seems to be mostly based on emotions. Take for instance a very close friend of yours. You are likely to say you know them because you have been friends for a while and it is likely that you share the same interests and hobbies etc and you have developed a close bond. However, there are likely to be a great many things you do not know about that person. It could be something from their past that has shaped who they are today or it could be something else but people always have personal secrets that they do not share with anyone else. Then there is also the question of how could you know that what you know is true. After all, you friend, or the person you think you know could have been lying. The poem ‘Do you know?’ was just my way of expressing my feelings of frustration with the world and in a way eith knowledge issues as it was hard for me to grasp the concepts of Theory of Knowledge at first. It is in a way a message to people who think they know someone (and people who think they know me) to think twice.