Poetry Night II

Tonight features the first poem I wrote at college. While I was at school, poetry became the creative outlet of the time, just like comedy is now. I went through a brief period of writing music but that took way too much time and I had little of that to spare while in college. So I'd get the occasional inspiration and write it out in verse:

Change
In the beginning
it was as it was
but it changed
as everything does
but why does it
change as it does

Now, it is
as it always was
and always will be
just because
that is how it is
why, just because

It will be
as it is and as it was
it changes but
we don't know the cause
it continues anyway
and continues without pause

The stanzas represent the past, present, and the future-- each embodied by the first line ( "In the beginning", "Now, it is", and "It will be"). Time changes just like everything else but, even as it gives the impression of change, it remains the same as each time period keeps the same rhyme scheme. The poem moves forward and gives both hints of the new and the old.

I wrote this shortly after arriving at college as I was barraged with a myriad changes in my life, just like everyone is when they have freedom thrust upon them. I was in a new place with new people dealing with new things. I had a new relationship and new classes with new challenges. But the new place turned out to be similar in many ways to places I've been, and the people reminded me of others I've known. I took the same lackadaisical approach to classes and studying that I always had in high school and it worked for me in college just as it once did (although I did work harder, I did in no way work as hard as I could).

While at first glance the poem is somewhat paradoxical, it is my verbose way of saying "the more things change the more they stay the same". Even with everything that changed around me, I was the same person. And as I took a closer look at everything that I thought was different, the surface discrepancies seemed to melt away and left an air of familiarity to them; a very general deja vu. It was all different and yet all the same. This theme, and variations of it, would appear in a number of my poems as it is a deep well from which to draw.