Entry tags:
Honoring the inner teen
The problem is that I've been writing too much poetry. Some of it is just that tortuous path to painting my mind needs to take sometimes, squeezing a feeling into an image, stretching the image into a poem, then trapping it in canvas.
(It's a strange process but it makes sense for me and that's the whole point of contemporary art. So, there.)
But the vast majority are verses showing up unannounced and making themselves at home, so that I have to write them because they plague me, same reason I write prose.
The problem with this is that, historically, I only do that when I'm in a specific sort of hopeless love. Not because I set out to write poetry to express my feelings, but because I get feelings that I can't really parse and writing has always been how I get around to processing emotions (see how the painting process makes sense now?) And, of course, not all feelings are hopeless love, it's just that I'm very good at recognizing other feelings. I've trained a lot for it.
Actually, now that I mentioned it, I have trained enough to recognize hopeless love that I could, technically, catch it before I start going into free verse.
At this point my hypothetical reader might have understood where I'm going with this. The thing that strikes me is that I've been writing too much poetry-- grief-striken poetry, pure sense of loss-- but I have no idea what I'm grieving. What I do know is that it's some powerfully goth stuff, very much what my teenage self would have considered worthy of blogging.
Which is why I'm posting two of them here. In honor of my teen self and all the poems they never posted:
*
I
Time and space are thieves,
and what they take from us
are small moments of silence inside a car
a glance shared between playlists
the wait outside while you finish your dumb cigarette
both of us shoulder to shoulder under the precarious shade, existing.
Nothing so precious we'll notice,
all gone before we do.
**
II
As dawn traces stars on wet cobbles
I walk through the streets
a blank canvas, stretched thin
and I miss you.
Soon it'll be day again
they'll all be gone,
dew, stars and fog
but, right now, headlights still catch
the last of the night in warm amber
I hope I'll see you soon
drawn into daylight, harsh and true
I hope you want me to.
***
(that's it, Hypothetical-chan, you can leave now)
(It's a strange process but it makes sense for me and that's the whole point of contemporary art. So, there.)
But the vast majority are verses showing up unannounced and making themselves at home, so that I have to write them because they plague me, same reason I write prose.
The problem with this is that, historically, I only do that when I'm in a specific sort of hopeless love. Not because I set out to write poetry to express my feelings, but because I get feelings that I can't really parse and writing has always been how I get around to processing emotions (see how the painting process makes sense now?) And, of course, not all feelings are hopeless love, it's just that I'm very good at recognizing other feelings. I've trained a lot for it.
Actually, now that I mentioned it, I have trained enough to recognize hopeless love that I could, technically, catch it before I start going into free verse.
At this point my hypothetical reader might have understood where I'm going with this. The thing that strikes me is that I've been writing too much poetry-- grief-striken poetry, pure sense of loss-- but I have no idea what I'm grieving. What I do know is that it's some powerfully goth stuff, very much what my teenage self would have considered worthy of blogging.
Which is why I'm posting two of them here. In honor of my teen self and all the poems they never posted:
*
I
Time and space are thieves,
and what they take from us
are small moments of silence inside a car
a glance shared between playlists
the wait outside while you finish your dumb cigarette
both of us shoulder to shoulder under the precarious shade, existing.
Nothing so precious we'll notice,
all gone before we do.
**
II
As dawn traces stars on wet cobbles
I walk through the streets
a blank canvas, stretched thin
and I miss you.
Soon it'll be day again
they'll all be gone,
dew, stars and fog
but, right now, headlights still catch
the last of the night in warm amber
I hope I'll see you soon
drawn into daylight, harsh and true
I hope you want me to.
***
(that's it, Hypothetical-chan, you can leave now)