Thursday, March 03, 2005

Examples

Central to this blog have been my madness poems. It's the only thing i truly know anymore. Every voice, vision, and phantom scent builds upon the last. However, they don't only build more madness; since the beginning, my romantic feelings go with verses and psychosis. I wrote much to Christine, and a lot to Jaime. These are my worst poems, as I look back on the sum of my words. I always thought that my verses were redeemed by the love that spawned them; I was wrong. My love is ugly, and its poetry is worse. Art should be strong, beautiful, and itself first. My love poems were always proxies to the real thing, and never turn out the way I want them to. My love is suffocation and pain; Jaime hated my love poetry. If you don't believe me, I've prepared some examples.

A LEAF FOR EVERY MOMENT IN A FOREST MADE FOR LOVE

With Jaime, i find happiness
In places I thought lost to me
In ways that seemed impossible
A forest grows inside my heart

I stalk those woods alone again
With open arms and lesser burdens
Accepting all the love sent me
I speak in verses, flurried, hurried

So thorns can still entangle me
And haul me down, entwinined with words
It’s good to clear the undergrowth
And let my lovetrees grow

A brush of bodies stops me
As whispers fill the air
I utter with full meaning
More words to say “I love you”

And Jaime whispers back “I know”
With smiles I see in all the lovetrees
Still beautiful and wonderful to me
I now see her and only her

Inviting every lucid moment
To stay with me in poetry,
I walk this forest made of love
That long seemed lost, but just was waiting

***

COLOR AND SHAPE

While Jaime’s out of reach,
I turn back on the pages
Spent tracing silhouettes
And chasing broken dreams.

The violence in my past
That’s absent in her arms
No longer rules my inkwell,
Now changed and for the better.

I painted vulgar colors
In blues and shining red
Imagining the sunrise
While lost without a light.

It seemed right at the time
In my infatuation
To stylize the world
Around hallucination.

Each morning before sunrise,
I saw the silhouette
And colored in the darkness
With dreams that never were

But now I have new colors
To use in writing verses
Like brown and green and purple:
Two hers, one mine, all vibrant.

In my maturity,
At last I set me free
To draw back on the curtains
And see what I’ve been tracing

I found two open arms
In unexpected places:
A friend, now something more
And shoulders, now painless, once hurt.

It’s comfort in a sense
To love, to lose, to find
That love is not a stranger:
I found it in my friend.

We both have memories
Of what life was before
In youth we can’t return to:
One dead, one gone, both painful

But now with every moment,
I color in my verses
Not with a sense of longing,
But simple satisfaction.

So now she sees my fury;
I fall in her embrace.
I wrap my arms around her
And trade my past for present:

I touch where once I saw;
I love where once I wondered;
I write from truth and beauty
Where once I wrote from pain.

Maturity proves real
Where youth became a lie:
My love is now beside me,
Not colors in the sky.

***

There are more Jaime poems, but I am so ashamed of them that I cannot post their limitless lameness. If you think my poems of Christine could be any better, I will show you only one of the missives I felt compelled to put down on paper, the rest are of approximate lameness.

WAVES

I dreamt that I could see you there
A source of light that shines on me
Reflecting light upon the waves
Your light is all that I can see

So kiss me softly, waves of gold
With hair that's red, and eyes of blue
If I could speak across the distance
I'd tell you now I love you true

The watercolor whispers here
Are telling me to reach anew
Without a flaw, my amber eye
Can't see the weak things I can't do

If I was more a lover then
And less a hate filled lion now
Perhaps the span would be much less
And I could know the where and how

Of where you went, of why you left
The Sun retreating on the beach
Towards the west, and out of sight
And like the Sun, you're out of reach

So come be near me dear Christine
Whose love, in haste, I threw away
Psychotic hubris, red and gore
I heard you tell me you won't stay

So love me now without a doubt
If only with a whisper's hue
On paper with a wetted brush
For all the days I'm loving you

***

You can see how and why I hate these damn things: sappy, didactic, dry, passionless. Unfortunately, Love remains part of my practiced craft; I can't stand myself sometimes, and it drives me to write more senseless love poems. For what possible advantage am I writing? Who will be swayed by this horrendous emotional drip? Am I going to wake up one day next to love provided at the tip of my pen? I don't think so. Perhaps I'll garnish pity in the poetic ampitheater, but not love. My verse is not as beautiful as Petrarch's, and not as cunning as the Bard's. I am not the very butcher of a silk button, or punning the golden laurel breeze. Every day, I supect more that I know only madness well enough to write it, as love seems further from my poetic grasp. Some days are longer than others.

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