Poetry?
You know what I love most about poetry? It has many forms and faces - yet can take none of them. It could rhyme, or it could be a mumbling and bumbling train of thoughts and emotions.
I discovered poetry early on in my life. There are many gaps in my memory - due to many a factor (which maybe I’ll talk about, or maybe I won’t).
I can distinctly remember a love struck middle school boy, not knowing how to express the feelings I had in my young heart by any other means other than a poem. I can remember the vulnerability of typing my love, in the dark, on a windows 95 word processor - the light of the screen pushing back the dark of the room, giving me the sense of hope.
I can remember printing it. I remember planning on delivering it to my love and then us blissfully running away and straight towards our forever.
(Ah to dream. To dream and to hope and to have the ability to craft such a wonderful story)
Dear Reader,
as you can imagine the dream and the actuality could never coexist - leaving a boy to be alone.
I think about this often. Why can I not remember simple things, fighting the fog that lives in my head?
Yet
I can remember the laughs of the love and the giggling of the crowd. I can remember the fingers pointing back at me amid the laughter.
I can feel the hurt.
I lost this moment, and for a while lost the passion and creativity. However, little by little, it came back.
And then it was an English Professor (whose name has been lost forever to the fog) from little campus, USA who ignited it. She held about 30 copies of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, was a semester away from retirement, and forced us to learn and write poetry.
Thus the hurt of my lost love & embarrassment reopened - but began to heal.
I too think of Professor often:
Did she find joy?
Did she find love?
Did she realize the impact she had?
So alas fair Reader,
This is not a book as you think it:
This is my soul.
And I welcome you into it.