I've been writing for as long as I can remember. My dad actually saved one of the first poems I ever composed, not too long after I learned how to read (which was freakishly early, lol - he started teaching me how when I was two. I could read at a college level by kindergarten. No kidding. I leaned over and read the teacher's worksheet manual to her, because I'd been looking at it over her shoulder and was irritated that she wasn't reading the instructions verbatim. Yeah, I was a bossy little kid like that.). It went: "I like the wind./It is pretty./It sings songs that only I can hear."
My writing hit its productivity peak between the ages of 14-23. I have a leather-covered notebook, that was given to me as a graduation/birthday gift from my boss at a restaurant I worked at way back when, that's full. I also have numerous other notebooks with poems, fragments of poems, and rewrites of older poems scattered throughout the boxes in my basement. I've struggled with clinical depression for a long time, and there is a direct connection between my depression and my writing - my output grows with my sadness, and declines with happiness. Thus, I haven't really written a lot since Matthew was born, other than letters to him and blogs on my old Myspace journal, which I've more or less abandoned.
Two of my favorite forms were unstructured blank verse and sonnets. Go figure. Two polar opposites. If that isn't a Gemini thing I'm not sure what would be, heh. At one point, I sought to impose a little more structure on my deliberately unstructured blank verse and started writing small self-descriptive verses I called "shorties." Between the age of 22 and 23, I wrote several of them.
The poems I'm posting here tonight are a few of my older ones from that time period, both short and long. There are three in total. I thought they were incredible at the time. The space and maturity of five years has lessened their glow somewhat, but there's still something in them that I approve of, hence their appearance here. Enjoy.
these poems are all my original work and have been copyrighted to me.
Me
written April 2004
Clear this smoke from my eyes
and let me see myself
in a cracked and forlorn mirror
wander through this deserted carnival
lost in my life
in the possibilities spread out before me
knock over two bottles and win, win, win a new soul
a new spirit
when all I want is another chance.
Decisions
written August 29, 2004
Maybe when this fog retreats I'll view myself
and realize that I'm not so bad
maybe my vision will crystallize
and I'll discover just where I'm headed
but these crossroads are confusing
and my precious seconds tick away
as my broken windshield wipers
slap in futility at the misty fingers clutching for my car
I watch my headlights knifing through
the dank and clammy blackness of confusion ever shrouding
this night, this road, my life
too many turns, it's never-ending
and I've never felt this disconnected
never felt so out-of-place
I wonder where I'll be in fifty years
wonder if I'll make it home
and will I remember each hard-fought lesson that I've learned?
through all these years of struggle
will everyone forget me?
am I doomed to be remembered solely for my actions?
or will there be one soul who pauses for a moment
and takes the time to look back fondly
and think kindly of this crooked smile?
On Relationships
written May 26, 2004 (following being dumped)
How do we move so quickly
from obsession to cold shoulders?
Your notes still haunt me
whispering their bitter lies from the depths of your disinterest
and the tears still cause the ink to run
across the callous page.
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