User Poetry
 

Someone somewhere made the mistake of suggesting I post some poetry. I will if you will. It doesn't have to be any good (as you will quickly see for yourself). I mainly focus on haibun, but here is something light-hearted I was inspired to write when my boys were young. I assert my copyright, such that that matters.

Age of Boys

Once upon a time, Boys ruled the Earth,
and the power of flight was attained
through bikes and scrap-wooden ramps.
(The True Believers could achieve much more,
hawk-riding thermals above the street lamps,
dangling from their Levi's jean-jacket sleeves.)

Sorcerers were clad in magic sneakers,
imbued with the ability to run faster,
jump higher, than the mortal neighbor brats.
Oh, Talisman of Power, the red sport logo!

Horrific weapons of warfare were crafted
from scrap lumber, tin pails, and dirt.
Holy Wars raged through eternal Saturdays;
resurrections of the Righteous
and the Unrighteous as even the slain
were called to dinner.

Loyalty was sworn in blood and spit,
bravery and cowardice revealed during
The Ritual Climbing of Mr. Miller's Trees.

Boys spoke all the Animal Tongues:
language of Toad and Salamander,
Robin, Crow, and Lower Dog.

They lived in the woods, their days
a meander along old Indian trails
and the muddy creekbed of the Amazon.

Then in sudden cataclysm
the Age of Boys was over
(a new species was the cause).
Scholars now study that ancient world,
that primitive time,
before the Age of Girls.

I like it. I don't usually go for the less structured forms, myself (I count myself no poetry scholar am I, just so you know), but I like this piece. :yes:

It does a great job of capturing "little boyness" and the abrupt ending has a good effect of demonstrating the abrupt ending there of.

I do forms as well, of course. Today I only write haibun, which is prose+haiku. My prose tends to be highly-cadenced, and in one case the prose is actually a sonnet, of all things, recast. Open form seemed to "feel right" in this instance, though.

Next?

hey, you turned around ! it makes more sense to be facing that way...

thanks for the poem ! i like it too. i like free verse and also structured poetry, as long as it's well-written. i like the way this one takes childhood seriously, without condescension, even though it sees the aspects that adults usually belittle... childhood is very serious, to children.

That's the thing I find so disappointing about adults, myself included too often: the loss of a sense of wonder. Sure, I know about how earthworms move (for example), but a kid doesn't, and when he sees one for the first time, he's fascinated just the same way I was the first time I saw it. I try to respond to kids in those sorts of situations differently than what I usually got: which was something to the effect of "yeah, so?"

This piece does a good job of recognizing and respecting that sort of wonder, even though the speaker has grown beyond it. That may be the core of why I like it, but I don't know if I would have been able to put my finger on it without your comments, zelda_pinwheel.

Let's not overlook the implication that everything changed once Girls were discovered. That's an entirely different genre, however.

Now, we need some other posters here. It doesn't have to be serious poetry. Heck, limericks will do.

I was looking for my books (I haven't really written anything myself for about 11 years), when I found them (hadn't unpacked them from the move), I remembered the stuff I wrote wasn't stuff I ever meant to share, and it's not nearly so good as it seemed to younger eyes. :rolleyes:

The things I've "written" since then were mostly in my head, so they're kind of hard to pull back out. :shrug:

sheesh, you're like some kind of reincarnation of Lewis Carroll.

Another on a similar theme. This is an example of a haibun, a Japanese form. Prose and haiku are combined, with a subtle and often tangential relationship between them. In this poem the link isn't so subtle, actually.

NAP-TIME

Just after lunch, when the paper plates and crumbs have been cleared from the table, the hands and plastic cups scrubbed clean, visits to the bathroom negotiated, comes the drowsy afternoon, tucked snug between the sheets in the amber-lit, blue-walled bedroom.

Quiet conversations, whispered at the border of perception, shuffle over the morning's debris: the menagerie loosed upon the ruins of block cities, toy metal cars screaming away from the confusion, storybooks piled in a riot of twisted pages and plot lines.

As the house creaks and settles into the slumber of regular breathing, the afternoon descends into the pages of my poems. Nap-time: morning's chaos woven into measured dreams; frozen stories, flickering eyes, fingers dancing on the keys.

nap-time...
childrens' voices
echo through the vents

user poetry.

more user poetry.

y'all are posting these in the wrong place ! pfff !!

:book2:

Margins
 

Tonight I'm browsing the "Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson" - "Isaac and Archibald", probably my favorite poem. I've always had an affinity for old men - I often think of old men I've known, the unplumbed depth of their meaningful silence. When E.A.R. writes of the "small boy's adhesiveness / To competent old age", I recognize the feeling.

This copy of the book is secondhand. It's been studied; the margins have penciled notations, a few of the stronger assertions in ink. I like to draw my own meanings from the poems, but take pleasure in the insights left behind. From time to time I add my own marginalia to the pages. I imagine this book making its way to others. I want to write something profound, but settle for a few smiley faces.

on the library steps
the blowing leaves
of a book

i also appreciate the communal aspect of used (or library) books, rendered explicit through annotations (as long as they don't take things too far, and the original text remains legible, of course...). sometimes it's only a typo crossed out and corrected in blue ink, or a cryptic word next to a paragraph...

when i see these traces, the tacit link i have with this anonymous previous reader materializes briefly, almost like a discussion dilated to the extreme, and i feel irrationally connected to them for a moment, almost like a friend.

deeply ironic that the mozzler of "passive emotifaction" should manifest his presence in the chain of used-book readers and annotators with smiley faces...

I bought some used books back in college until one of them turned out to be highlighted and marked by an idiot. I felt no linkage.