Finally.

So, the last time I posted, I promised to share some of my own writings with you. And then... well...life got in the way. A cold, a massive schedule transition, and a bit of trepidation at exposing my creative side again after 10 years all massed together to provide a month of delay. However, after reading some of my work at an open mic last night and surviving, I decided it was time to make good on that promise.

These are the poems I read last night. All written at least 10 years ago. This first one was a class assignment, in which we were asked to write a sonnet. In my free-verse, totally unstructured, hippie-type mind, this was the worst thing you could have asked me to do. So I wrote a sonnet about how much I hated sonnets. (I've since learned to love them.)

The Long Awaited and Much Despised Sonnet
Structure art a ponderous thing
it stilteth writing greatly
for rules, my pencil will not sing
they're stiff, and much too stately.

The freeing absence of such structure
allows my words to echo my thoughts.
But forced, my pencil becomes bitter,
for it cannot find what long it sought.

Methinks that others also share
a yearning for this freedom.
None of us for structure care.
Those who do? We bleed 'em!

Yet dons and deans I have to sate,
So for the present I'll cease to prate.

These next two poems are great examples of the classic college angst I felt when it came to love and relationships. One, as you'll quickly recognize, was written when things were good. The other, when I had decided that I had no room in my life for the male gender. Thankfully, after 13 years, my perspective has balanced out a little. But I still like some of the imagery in both of them.

Somewhere
Somewhere between a memory and a dream
I slipped on a kiss and fell in love with you
Fell down and down and down
out of myself
into you and your soul stream

Remembering a dream

stuck in a memory

I'm standing in a hall of mirrors
reflecting only you

and I don't care that I've lost myself
I don't think I want to find me

Somewhere II
Somewhere between ever present memory
and nonexistent now
we had it.

I can't define it
I don't know how long it lasted

But for that one eternal microsecond
Your thoughts grasped mine
with the power of a newborn's fist
around my finger.

We entered together
the terrifying world
inside each other

Unaware, unforgivably naive
uninformed
that to venture there
is to toy with death

oh, we pled innocence
even to each other
blithely believing
desperately ignoring

plugging our intellectual ears
to the subcutaneous screaming

the supersonic death knell
sounding somewhere
beneath our already
crumbling
friendship (?)