Poetry
I haven't updated in quite some time, and I am sorry for my inattention. I offer, therefore, two poems I've written for my poetry class this semester. The first is in anything-I-want style and the second is a sestina, which has a very specific structure. (That's why there's patterned repetition of words.) Enjoy!
Shot with an over-exposed blaze of lightning
The ruddy playground unzipped itself
My tiny mass teetering between the fleeing edges
Until my balance slipped and my life became
A late brunch for the endless void new-born of the repelled cliffs
Tumbling downward, upward, forever-ward through the black
I awake in fetal position shell shock
A roly-poly curled safe in the shell of my bed
Breathing heavy or not at all, I wiggle out of the sheets
And shuffle toward the familiar comfort of my parents' room
But I stop short and remember:
I'm a big kid now - three years old
Three big, brave years
I flex my superhero biceps
At the monsters still skulking in the shadows
They get the message:
I'm a big kid now and I'm not scared.
The next morning, I emerge proudly from my room
A survivor, a phenomenon, a force to be reckoned with
Beneath my ankle-length night shirt
My bare feet clap the marble floor
As I march to the breakfast table and announce my triumph
"I had a bad dream."
"Oh sweetie, why didn't you wake us?"
I try to feign indignation at the suggestion
But my toothy, self-satisfied grin gets the best of me
"Cause I'm a superhero."
Twenty years old now, I search through the smog for the yellow California sun
And I'm 100 pounds of aerial loops and red boxer briefs
A supersonic wonderkid of the midnight era
But the courage comes in fits and starts these days
And too often I wake choking on tears
Drained from the feverish visions of these unholy nights
I may be two decades of tough
But I reach for her hand just the same
And when we wake in the morning like ivy entwined, I tell her:
"I had a bad dream."
"Love, why didn't you wake me?"
She doesn't know what a pair we'd made
The spandex-clad champions of my predawn reveries
"Cause I’m a superhero."
She doesn't know that, with her hand in mine,
She'd been a superhero, too.
Brit lit class, and it's James Joyce and his fictional self.
Stephen Dedalus is trying to write a poem, and
so am I. I catch an occasional phrase of the talk
about Dublin and religion, prostitutes and school-boys
and write an occasional word of my poem, but it's too
hard to concentrate on poetry or Joyce's Irish
flock today, when I have on my mind my own Irish
chum. Well, American really, from Detroit like myself,
but with red hair and blush-ready freckles too.
It's not Stephen but Shawn who wanders into my daydreams and
diverts my attention from my professor, a tubby boy
of a man who more stammers than talks
though even if he could talk,
it wouldn't matter today. No literature, British or Irish,
can top my excitement that my best friend, this boy,
is coming tonight. I sit in class and Shawn sits by himself
on a plane that tunnels through Cool Whip clouds and
back to the blue skies that upside-down pave the way to
the West he's never seen. I wonder how he's spending two-
thousand miles of airtime: gaping at window-framed America, perhaps, or talking
to the pious elderly man to his left about the rubbery plane food and
world economics and why such a well-mannered young Irish
Catholic fellow is flying to godless LA. Smiling to himself,
he tells the old gent that he's visiting a girl. "Oh, boy!
Well, isn't that nice?" the man exclaims absently, but the boy's
mind is already elsewhere and now my class is turning to
another story and it's more Joyce: this time a lovesick chap who lets himself
die when his girl moves away and he's left with no one to talk
to, no one to love. I'm listening, but already this poor Irish
imp has become Shawn, someone to love, but so far away, and
it's my fault. I traipsed across the American continent and
left him. But we are not the bereaved girl and the dead boy
of James Joyce's imagination. My goofy-grinned Irish
love lives and comes today to the sun-bleached coast to
see me. My class keeps reading, my professor keeps stutter-talking
and I keep drumming on my desk and humming expectantly to myself.
And high in the sky, a certain Irish boy waits expectantly, too.
Politely engaging his elderly neighbor in idle small talk,
in his mind he taps my drumbeat and hums happily to himself.
Shot with an over-exposed blaze of lightning
The ruddy playground unzipped itself
My tiny mass teetering between the fleeing edges
Until my balance slipped and my life became
A late brunch for the endless void new-born of the repelled cliffs
Tumbling downward, upward, forever-ward through the black
I awake in fetal position shell shock
A roly-poly curled safe in the shell of my bed
Breathing heavy or not at all, I wiggle out of the sheets
And shuffle toward the familiar comfort of my parents' room
But I stop short and remember:
I'm a big kid now - three years old
Three big, brave years
I flex my superhero biceps
At the monsters still skulking in the shadows
They get the message:
I'm a big kid now and I'm not scared.
The next morning, I emerge proudly from my room
A survivor, a phenomenon, a force to be reckoned with
Beneath my ankle-length night shirt
My bare feet clap the marble floor
As I march to the breakfast table and announce my triumph
"I had a bad dream."
"Oh sweetie, why didn't you wake us?"
I try to feign indignation at the suggestion
But my toothy, self-satisfied grin gets the best of me
"Cause I'm a superhero."
Twenty years old now, I search through the smog for the yellow California sun
And I'm 100 pounds of aerial loops and red boxer briefs
A supersonic wonderkid of the midnight era
But the courage comes in fits and starts these days
And too often I wake choking on tears
Drained from the feverish visions of these unholy nights
I may be two decades of tough
But I reach for her hand just the same
And when we wake in the morning like ivy entwined, I tell her:
"I had a bad dream."
"Love, why didn't you wake me?"
She doesn't know what a pair we'd made
The spandex-clad champions of my predawn reveries
"Cause I’m a superhero."
She doesn't know that, with her hand in mine,
She'd been a superhero, too.
Brit lit class, and it's James Joyce and his fictional self.
Stephen Dedalus is trying to write a poem, and
so am I. I catch an occasional phrase of the talk
about Dublin and religion, prostitutes and school-boys
and write an occasional word of my poem, but it's too
hard to concentrate on poetry or Joyce's Irish
flock today, when I have on my mind my own Irish
chum. Well, American really, from Detroit like myself,
but with red hair and blush-ready freckles too.
It's not Stephen but Shawn who wanders into my daydreams and
diverts my attention from my professor, a tubby boy
of a man who more stammers than talks
though even if he could talk,
it wouldn't matter today. No literature, British or Irish,
can top my excitement that my best friend, this boy,
is coming tonight. I sit in class and Shawn sits by himself
on a plane that tunnels through Cool Whip clouds and
back to the blue skies that upside-down pave the way to
the West he's never seen. I wonder how he's spending two-
thousand miles of airtime: gaping at window-framed America, perhaps, or talking
to the pious elderly man to his left about the rubbery plane food and
world economics and why such a well-mannered young Irish
Catholic fellow is flying to godless LA. Smiling to himself,
he tells the old gent that he's visiting a girl. "Oh, boy!
Well, isn't that nice?" the man exclaims absently, but the boy's
mind is already elsewhere and now my class is turning to
another story and it's more Joyce: this time a lovesick chap who lets himself
die when his girl moves away and he's left with no one to talk
to, no one to love. I'm listening, but already this poor Irish
imp has become Shawn, someone to love, but so far away, and
it's my fault. I traipsed across the American continent and
left him. But we are not the bereaved girl and the dead boy
of James Joyce's imagination. My goofy-grinned Irish
love lives and comes today to the sun-bleached coast to
see me. My class keeps reading, my professor keeps stutter-talking
and I keep drumming on my desk and humming expectantly to myself.
And high in the sky, a certain Irish boy waits expectantly, too.
Politely engaging his elderly neighbor in idle small talk,
in his mind he taps my drumbeat and hums happily to himself.