| [ |
mood |
| |
 mother, please shut up. |
] |
Here are some poems I wrote for my English classes. I'm not posting them because I'm proud of them, but I do want to use them as a basis for writing Better poems — poems actually worth reading that examine real, fucked up shit. Maybe I need to experience more fucked up shit before that can actually happen. Either way, hopefully in the next few weeks, I'll learn how to write Real poems.
Here we go...
#1: Tourists
“A black cat comes out to greet us as if to say, ‘Look at me and not some Romanesque church. I am alive.’” – Adam Zagajewski, “On the Route”
We are tourists, the two of us.
We walk along crooked streets
that bend around buildings
like strings tangled, turning.
To the left, a far, fat Gothic
dressed up in pinnacles.
To the right, a Romanesque
round, stiff, the Spartan sort.
We stand between the two
unmoving and unfeeling,
our eyes all unthinkingly stuck
on the stock-still churches.
And then,
like an errant breeze,
a small cat struts beside us,
flaunting her fur.
Look at me.
(A whisper, almost imperceptible.)
We oblige,
heads heavy with hesitation,
hands holding maps
that only confound the stone, dead wilderness.
Look at me.
(Louder, now.)
We wait;
she rests on her haunches,
thinking, sizing us up,
her animal eyes unblinking.
Look at me for I am alive.
__________________________
#2: I Saw You Wandering
I saw you wandering the hall,
Up, down, up — oh, those stately socks!
You scaled the stairs and braved the porch
And on her haunches, hissed the cat:
careful.
I saw you sprinting from the car,
And soon your backpack bobbed to life.
And as you ran, the lockers looked.
Watching you close, they whispered soft:
careful.
I saw you standing, stuck in line,
Your fingers stuck onto a tray,
Poking the sinking Styrofoam,
Just as the pudding cups sang out:
careful.
I saw you running on the lawn,
Your greasy hair lapping the wind.
You hopped a stone and tossed a leaf,
Then heard our mother’s siren-call:
careful.
I saw you walking, trailing me,
Until you slipped on your shoelace.
But little brother, even then,
I cupped my mouth, too late, and cried:
careful.
___________________________
#3: To the Mouse in My Apartment
You, weary wanderer of the night,
Murmur through shadows, moving ground.
And with inky eyes bulging wide with fright
And rubbery lungs, you squeeze out a sound.
You, king of cupboards and the drying rack,
Who I saw slip soundlessly out from the wall.
With white-washed, soot-smeared belly and back,
You hesitated, then hurried and bent through the hall.
You, four-legged crumb-thief in a holding cell,
Who scares four figures up onto their chairs,
Where they stand stick-straight, screeching, and yell,
Before setting up traps — a toxin affair!
And now.
You, fur-coated critter, so curled up tight,
No longer to wander, weary through the night.
___________________
#4: Hymn to the Library
A row of heads all folded down —
The weary ones who stayed past one.
Their eyes, like flies, flit off the ground
As the silence stirs: someone is done.
A girl, nineteen, with wrinkled hair
Stands up, and sways, and stretches too.
She’s quiet now, and doesn’t stare,
yet her cheeks are drained of any hue.
But wait, what’s this?
She pauses, sits, her mind reversed.
The ling’ring hiss
Of work undone, of empty verse.
A sigh, like heavy winter snow —
Be quiet now, they tell her. Please.
She sits again, and thinks: What woe!
O, if only I were done with these!
A maze of shelves in soldier’s stance
Surround her now, contain her here.
Her eyes are dead, an empty trance,
But she blinks, unblinks, and holds her ears.
Then like a rill, her pencil glides
Across a page that’s blank and bleak.
But as she writes, her mind abides —
For a cold cubicle has saved her week.
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bracefacestace's Friends Page
indescribable