My Senior year of High School I took creative writing as an elective to ensure I had at least one class I could guarantee myself to enjoy after personally forcing myself to take Physics, Calculus and International Relations…two of which involve a heavy amount of math, something I am absolutely not good with and the other was not anything like what it’s name implies… remember current affair projects in elementary school? Yeah take that, stretch it to an hour long, get middle class high school kids to share their opinions as if they were important and end the trimester with a head full of geography but completely void of any thought provoking knowledge, like “Why so many more middle eastern countries now than there were 10 years ago? How did this happen and what are the future implications of those events in regards to our country?” Not THAT would have been something i would have imagined to be part of the International Relations curriculum!….
Alright, before I allow myself to drift off too deep into that tangent, I’ll get back to my originally intended subject to discuss. Creative writing and how it convinced my emotionally erratic teenage brain that I could or should ever write poetry and then go a step further by displaying where real people might actually read it. If those people were animals there would be some serious intervention from P.E.T.A due to the inhumanity of it all.
The poetry unit involved writing several different styles, genres, rhyming schemes and other such variations of poetry. We worked on an Imaginative Poem for one of the first assignments. Mrs. Durler, my teacher, read a bit of my poem over my shoulder and insisited that I read it out load…now, once you read the poem you’ll understand why I wanted to take my pencil and jam it straight into my temple.
For a high school student who had never been on a date I had a pretty tragic, distraught point of view of what love was like. I blame it entirely on my obsession with the book “Phantom” by Susan Kay…which to this day stands uncontested as my all time favorite book. as well as having some of my favorite reads to include, Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Les Miserables” as well as having been smitten by movies along the likes of “Moulin Rouge”, “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Vanilla Sky”.
I did it, I read the poem out loud. No one said a word. I was odd, and I figured they were all being nice. I pushed away images in my head of how ridiculous I could have looked and sounded.
Some time passes, maybe a week, we work on writing a sonnet. Our goal was to write a sonnet similar to the English Sonnets that Shakespeare wrote. If you want to know about sonnets go here
So I finish writing this sonnet and next thing I know friggin Mrs. Durler is telling the class that since my poem was so good the last time, that she’d like to hear this one as well, totally volunteering me to another round of humiliation.
So I read it.
Then I realize something. Holy shit, they’re about the same fucking thing. Tragic love story of two hearts so enraptured that their very love is what devises their fatal end.
Here they are now. The poems. First is the Imaginative Poem the second is the Sonnet.
Love: an imploding star
The two gazes halted and locked,
simply by mistake,
a jarring moment of discomfort,
then ecstatic wonder.
Two pairs of eyes fly,
meeting with violent embrace,
crackling as if conversing in static syllables ,
a product of their electric power.
singing in unison a low joyous hum,
like a resonanation of their magnetic pull.
Lashes frantic,
they flutter.
Iris’s deliquesce into puddles,
liquid pools of color,
melted from their own shared heat.
A crash.
A shudder.
A tiny mutter.
A whispered cry,
Two souls persish together.
Consumed by the insatiable hunger,
born in the belly of their volatile love.
Two hearts thrashed and scattered.
Cremated in a destructive wildfire of need,
progeny of their unbridled passion and tragic fate.
Star-crossed lovers ,
fade together,
die,
implode.
They leave behind only dreams…
of phantom murmurs of ardor,
pitter-patter echos of fluttering hearts,
and stars that fall so slowly,
like tears from a heartbroken sky.
::Sonnet::
5/23/2002
Forbidden Love
The glittering stars hold me in rapture;
Your innocent eyes awaken my smile;
I’d die to know your heart I could capture;
Please let me hold you in my arms awhile;
For just one night let me possess your soul;
When dawn comes I’ll release you forever;
Let me memorize each freckle and mole;
after tonight shall I see them never;
Oh, how cruel are these sick, sadistic fates;
Who watch the lives of mortals with great glee;
and take their pleasure in pulling apart mates;
then see lovers die for love not to be;
shall we ignore them and for one night lie,
and wait for the sunrise when we shall die?
::And I’m gonna throw this one in here for the hell of it….It follows the same theme::
5/22/2002
Death from a broken heart
After the strange requiem stops playing madly,
and the peices of my broken heart have been swept off the floor,
and my eyes are swollen shut from weeping,
then will I be free from the rememberance of you.