What were you like at fourteen?

I was sitting with my back against a concrete wall, listening to music and reading poetry in all of my angsty glory.

In a perfect world, this would have taken place in some historic, brick high school with a gothic library and fall leaves to complement my Simon & Garfunkel phase. But really this all went down in sunny Southern California in a beach community. The concrete wall I sat against was part of an outside hallway that had a view of the ocean. Palm trees lined the streets. Açai shacks, coffee vans, and sandy ocean plunges were what you did. It was a California dreamscape and its brilliance blinded me. I couldn’t always see things in the ways that I felt I was supposed to, like what was so special about a football game or pep rally or fitting in.

But that’s another story. The point is, at fourteen I was reading poetry during lunch. And that poetry became a part of me. It nestled into my bones and slipped under my tongue. It crawled down my throat into my gut, giving me the kind of stomach that I would need to get through the years to come. Which is to say, the kind of masochistic stomach that would run head first into big experiences because they were something real that I could dissect and learn from through writing. I didn’t know it yet, but that would be a real career-maker for me.

POETRY IS A LOVE STORY

In the years that followed I met Sylvia Plath, Patti Smith, Ocean Vuong, Anne Carson, Maya Angelou, Rudy Francisco, Rupi Kuar, Pablo Neruda, W.H. Auden, and so many more. They became lighthouses for me as I navigated the storm that was my adolescence falling into young adulthood. They were who I hung out with during lunch when everyone else was far away. I could not understand the average high schooler, but I could understand Plath sitting under a tree and feeling that every variation of her future was a fig and that the longer she took to pick one, the more that each option fell and rotted at her feet. And I knew something of what Carson felt to never have been in love before and for it all to have felt like a wheel rolling downhill that first time. And when Auden begged to always be the more loving one, to never be plagued by the useless malaise of apathy and all that it robs you of, I felt that too. I felt it all.

For long before I looked into the eyes of the brilliant boy who would talk about gothic architecture and stellar fusion with me, I looked at the words that these humans put on paper. And I fell in love.

Now, all of these years later, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I sit in a classroom and talk about poetry with a brilliant professor and some truly eccentric peers and it has become a kind of therapy for me. It can really restore your faith in humanity and make you feel less alone in this world to hear the innermost thoughts of a bunch of strangers. Art does that.

It’s that class that inspired this fun post, as well as this one.

SOME POEMS

In honor of this rambling ode to poetry, here are a few fun poems that I’ve written recently.

[Below: a lipogram I wrote, excluding the letter “a”. The longer, prose version is linked here.]

How Poppy Petals Fall Like Innocence at My Feet
I keep finding butterfly wings in my coffee
bright red poppies in my bed sheets 
violets bleeding under my feet
their fresh hue oozing into my skin
forcing my flesh to belong to spring 
Terrorized by memory 
of roses blooming in your cheeks
of those long month’s showers never bringing flowers
only me to the end of you 
Over to the beginning of me 
Of how spring died so summer could rot 
my innocence 
in the light of the full moon 
while I looked to you 
only to find roses dying
colorless hues exposing truth. 
By June I drowned.
Lost somewhere in the blueness of the July sky. 
It opened up for me 
It pulled me inside 
It left me crying over things born to die 

[Below: an erasure poem that I created using pages 12-14 of Ocean Vuong’s book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous]

Whispers of War 
I survive the memory 
Lost, woven genes
War and your name left behind
Time filled with fire 
underneath your breathing 
I was there 
But shaking 
You told me the world holds nothing 
Alone, hungry, empty 
You said a monster is a ghost 
Heads snapping like fingers 
But you lied
I want a monster 
A messenger 
A lighthouse 
A warning 
Prepare for war
possess the body 
I know your eyes, I studied them 
Later I would look for you 
In debris blowing across the sky 

JOIN THE FUN

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