Poetry Night IV

Questions
A look, a smile, a laugh for me?
Is there more from you than I see?
Is there less right here than I hope?

Do I make all my feelings known?
Do you see everything I've shown?
Can I keep on playing the dope?

What here can I form with you?
Can we, from nothing, create anew?
Can these solutions be inferred?

Is there anything short of saying?
Can this price be worth the paying?
Can these questions ever be answered?

I wrote this one while back in college and the reasons behind this one I suspect are pretty obvious so it doesn't require too much explanation. There has been a lot of questions on my mind lately (mostly unrelated to ones in poem but questions are questions) so I thought of this poem and I figured I'd post it.

Until Next Time

Until next time
never shall I see
that laughing face
I'll survive I'm sure
lesser than I should
Never shall I see
each beautiful inch
xanthous hair and royal eyes
that hypnotize my mind
The separation shall be pain
I'll survive I'm sure
miserable though I may be
eagerly awaiting you.

This is a poem I started a long time ago and finally finished just yesterday. It an acrostic poem (where the first letter, in this case, of each line spells out a word/phrase/whatever). I changed it up so that the first line of the poem is the phrase spelled out by the acrostic, what I am dubbing a perpendicular acrostic.

The acrostic phrase is my favorite way to end a letter and so with it comes a feeling of being apart waiting for the next conversation/meeting. And the poem is a natural extension of that.

Poetry Night III

It has been a while, but poetry night is back. I'm sure everyone has been praying that this come back, so here it is.

Apparently, I wasn't accurate in my first poetry night post as I said that was the oldest poem I had written but I was wrong. I don't know why I said that because I had the following one then. This one dates a full year earlier than the first, all the way to 9th grade English class. (I know I have two older poems somewhere-- one titled "Unlucky Day" from that same year and one from 6th grade when I wrote a poem about the Norman Invasion of England... yes, I was a weird kid).

This one is untitled.

He looked for a place to escape or somewhere to run
But, alas, to his dismay he found there was none
Even so, he waited for a chance to flee
for if he did not escape, he knew he would be
dead in a moment, killed by the madman's knife
Although the outcome looked bleak, he prayed for his life

The guards pushed him forward into a small cramped room
the approaching footsteps sounded impending doom
his future killer stood near him with a dagger at the ready
he tried to fight or to struggle but the guards held him steady
The assassin grinned evilly as the knife began to rise
he could do nothing but stand there with tears in his eyes

the dagger flashed down and cracked into his spine...
The next day there was a special, fresh hamburger meat $2.29

A scathing look at the meat industry, isn't it? It was written from a cow's point of view going to the slaughter. Now I am not a vegetarian but one of my friends at the time was. I remember have a discussion about eating meat and other related things and it inspired me to write the preceding poem (that and the assignment that was given in class-- inspiration combined with a deadline is the situation under which I can create the most).

Mr. S, my English teacher that year, was a bit of a douche. First of all, when reading this poem to the class he totally blew the last line. Obviously, the poem is written in rhyming couplets, and as such the end of last line should be read as "fresh hamburger meat two twenty nine". He instead read it as "fresh hamburger meat two dollars and twenty nine cents". Any English teacher worth his salt should have realized that reading the line like that would kill both the rhyme scheme and the meter (as loose as the meter was... his version still just sounds stupid).

Of course, that just goes to show he was an idiot, not a douche. But he also was a douche-- he would insert smug statements in the middle of class for no reason (e.g. "Oh, I live in a much richer neighborhood than any of you" which even if true, and that is debatable, is still a pathetic thing to claim over the students in your class). He also would make fun of the students, and as usual I was one of the few who would stand up to him. I told him to shut up once while he was insulting me-- apparently, he thought it was OK to make fun of his students and not for them to fight back in any way.

You may just say that I was a stupid kid and he probably wasn't that bad. But even the other teachers agreed. My friend (the one who inspired the poem) and I were in the teacher's office area talking to our senior year teacher when Mr. S came over and said something stupid that I don't remember. As soon as he walked away our much cooler teacher said, "He is such a prick."

OK, so I wrote more about my 9th grade English teacher than the poem, but I think that was much more interesting anyway (plus, I pretty much said everything there is about the poem....).

The Third Law

The storm rages around me
lightning streaks the gloomy sky
The hail batters my body
I believe I am to die

Twisters tear my home asunder
whilst lava sets it ablaze
a quake knocks me to my back
its power does scare and amaze

Desperate to save my little life
I think of a cunning scheme
I yell to the storm, "I love you"
and it flees with a frightened scream.

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.

Poetry Night

I'm going to posts old poems that I've written weekly. I have a number I've written so I might as well use them for some fun purpose. In order to make it a bit more interesting, I'll give the back story to them.

The first one I'll post is the oldest one I have a copy of (although I've got a ton of old notebooks, folders, and Trapper Keepers from my middle and high school career at my parent's house so there may be some older ones I am unaware I have a copy of). This one comes from all the way back in 1995, when I was in 10th grade:

Hell
The hordes march slowly toward it,
         a place feared by many
How any ordinary building can be
         so feared is uncanny

But of course, 'tis not the building
         they really fear
but the monsters that lurk inside
         that they must revere

They are herded through the doors
         and down the hall
pushed towards their cells with no hope
         for escape at all

You, spirit broken, just give in
         and follow the masses
The bell rings, and all the kids
         head for their classes

I've never been one who liked authority and this clever little poem was my 15 year old way of fighting the power. Yes, I was quite the rebel back then.

Although its message still rings true to how students are treated as cattle or prisoners that are at the whim of their captors. And in the end most students do just give in and trod along through school as mindless zombies. I'm sure I noticed the irony of someone who refuses to give in to authority writing about how everyone gives up in the end, and I'm sure I thought myself extremely clever.

The poem in its original form had an additional line at the end of, "It's Hell!!!". I added that in because, at the time, I thought the symbolism and imagery of the preceding four stanzas were just too subtle. However, as I matured I realized that was a bit much and made an artistic decision to excise that line. It is pretty much on the same scale as George Lucas going back and messing with the original Star Wars. Pretty much.

Also, part of the reason the title of this poem was particularly relevant in my 10th grade English class was because of the teacher, let's call her Mrs. T (to protect her anonymity, even though she is probably dead by now). Her classroom was a bit like hell... not because she was a bad teacher, or mean, or abusive. No, it was because she smelled horrible. Really. It is hard to describe it-- it was B.O. and yet so much more. It wasn't one of those odors you got used to after a while either; it was omnipresent. There was no escape. Particularly bad was the times we would be writing in class and she would come around and check up on you by leaning over your desk in such an odd was as to strategically position her armpit near your cowering nose. It seemed a strange way to stand and it left me to wonder if she did it intentionally.

We could always tell when Mrs. T was out sick. If we were walking down the English hallway to our classroom and we didn't smell her, we knew we had a substitute. I'm serious-- it sounds unbelievable but it's true. We had a 100% success rate using that method. Maybe that'll give you reading this a sense of the olfactory hell we went through.

Of course, there were some urban legends that went around about Mrs. T. There was a rumor that for Christmas one year one of her classes got her a present of soaps, deodorants, etc. and that she left the room crying. There was also the rumor that she smelled that way because she slept with the body of her dead husband. I know, it is horribly mean, but we were high schoolers, what do you want?

And thus is the story behind "Hell".