So, I'm taking a poetry writing class now, mainly because it's required for my emphasis. I'd hoped to enroll in yet another prose class, but it was not to be. As it turns out, I've enjoyed the class a great deal, and have turned out a few lines that I think are decent. None of them are finished products, and most of them were written in an extremely short span of time. But Elton John wrote the majority of his songs in 20 minutes or less, and he's considered a pretty good lyricist. So I think that justifies it. Anyway, here are a few I've been working on. Guess under which circumstances I wrote this first one.
"Lit Analysis"
Few college minds,
Hope of our future,
Are truly awake at this hour-
Too engulfed in last night’s
Party or tomorrow’s exam
To heed Chaucer’s counsel.
The tweed man, conversely, thrives
On his cream and artificial sunrise.
He divulges to us, in big words, secrets
He’s wanted to tell of since he
Was a boy: How Conrad showed
Him mankind as it is. How
Hemingway defined for him a
Generation in five-word
Sentences. How Whitman carried
Him up to the stars and
Made him aware, before MLA
Documentation caught him,
And sent him back to bed.
"Exposition"
If words were vitamins
Or different colored crayons-
This one for contentedness,
And this one for ire,
And this one for admiration-
You would never have seen
The black eeking forth from
The corners of my mouth,
Hardening like wax.
I didn’t know it was there.
Under the tripwire, unspotted
By the ambiguity, but
The words don’t let spies through.
They know more than we do.
One that we hadn’t planned-
But which on careful consideration,
We find to be right.
"Ode to a Parking Garage"
It’s not always an orphanage
Or a park to be paved
That a parking garage may then rise.
It sometimes is even convenient.
It’s not any small project-
Ten thousand dollars per stall, as it were,
To construct such a place
I consider my own.
It isn’t a forest, a babbling brook,
It’s boxier, darker, and gray.
But shouldn’t I be allowed to take refuge right here?
This cube understands me so well.
Neither inside nor outside,
Nor public, nor private,
Not here, not yet there.
A medium, conduit, channel, no more.
Is it that ambiguity
That turns us against it?
We don’t understand it at all.
“Such a blight on our town.”
So it may not be pretty, but
What if it was? Could we ever admit it?
Form that’s born out of function,
Grocery bag tumbleweeds and black oil ponds,
Fresh and thick yellow lines
Direct cars of all sizes, all shapes, and all colors
To commence with their slumber,
Caring not who they are, why it is that they’ve come.
Or honestly thought of at all.
But my roots are here, safe tight in the sprawl.
If they’re pillars, not trees, then I’m sorry.
Nature cannot provide
This great thing we’ve designed-
A concrete consultant in structural form-
The most natural place in the city.
"The Trans-Siberian Railroad"
We piled the extra horse blankets
In front of the heater to stop the flow
Of Russian over-compensation
And the gentle undulation
That now has lulled
My companions to sleep on narrow sleds
Folded out of the edge
Of a room unforgiving and metallic as the
Clanging of the rails, with gaps swollen
And contracted by the bitter cold that builds
unhindered.
No hills,
No towns,
I’d see the axis-pole. But no.
Just a gloss of flaky water
Many meters high, hardened
By months of inactivity. A state
Where life cannot survive under the suffocating
Blankets. A forever sleeping land.
Except every couple hours, a town
Approaches and then passes as quickly as the
Lantern’s flicker as a man dons his fox
And his bear, to prepare to venture out,
The only time today, into the deep
To retrieve unfrozen water from the pump
To bring back to his frozen hovel,
Where no blankets go unused.
So there's that. My favorite thing to write (by far) are short stories, but I'm a little more protective of those. I'll work on some. Anyhow, I'm pretty sure the Diamondbacks/Rockies game is starting soon, so I'll probably go turn down the volume and pretend to read The Anatomy of Revolution to appease my restless self.
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