I Want to Know Myself
Aura Thundera deonii@yahoo.com


Author's Note:
(it should help explain the poem, so please read it, I know it's long.)

First important piece of information-I am only 18 years old, and I never liked a single one of the teen heart-throbs who was popular.  And I HATE Titanic.

Ever since I was small, (as in about four years old) I have had a strange, repeating dream.  I am laying in a bed, in a little room that's in the attic of a house (the ceiling is low, and it slopes).  There is one dormer window across from the door that looks out on a night sky.  There's a bunch of posters of men with long, wavy hair on the walls.  I know enough now to be able to identify their "wierd" clothes with Seventies fashions, though it did seem very strange to me when I was small.  A folding table has a pile of magazines and books on it, and it sits against the wall on the other side of the door.

And the house is on fire-I know that I am burning too, but like in all dreams, I can't feel it.  I can see the fire, and on the ceiling, ringed by the fire, there's this picture of a man with long dark hair.   That face is always the last one that I see in the dream.  The whole thing scares the liver out of me.

About a month ago (or thereabouts) I came home from work after a closing shift, and I was flipping through the channels on the TV.  I stopped off at A&E to see who the Biography was, and it turned out to be Shirley Jones.  I watched for a few moments, out of curiosity, and I got sucked in.  The were talking about when the Partridge Family was cancelled, and they showed a cover of a magazine with a photo of David Cassidy on it.  This was the first time that I'd ever seen a picture of David Cassidy in my life (heck, the first time I'd ever heard the name.).

Well, I was so startled that I dropped my reheated pizza on the floor.  IT WAS HIM!  The man on the poster in my dream was on the TV in front of me.  I ditched the pizza on the floor (Mom was not pleased with me in the morning.)  and went upstairs to the computer in the spare bedroom.  I logged on to the Internet and did a quick search for "David Cassidy" on Yahoo! and the pix I found confirmed that the men on the posters in my dream were really Shaun and David Cassidy.  And I even found a scan of the EXACT SAME POSTER as the one on the ceiling in my dream.

I was thouroughly freaked.  I have always been very paranoid about fire (I cannot go near it, or I start getting really panicky.) and for no particular reason.  And I knew I'd never seen or heard of Shaun and David before.  But I recognized them.  I always thought that reincarnation seemed like a good idea, and now the primary thought running through my head was "It's not a dream!  It's how I DIED in a past life!"

Ahem.  Done rambling, now on with the poem.  I hope that the ramble helps the poetry make sense.


I know I've seen pieces of the past
Now and again, I'll recognize it
What is there wrong with being
A bit out of sync with the times?
When past is painless wonderland
In which one could veritably drown?
I don't want modernity, ever,
When modernity is dull to me
Why bother with DiCaprio
When past men beckon to me?
Why try to listen to N'SYNC,
A sound that grates upon my ears,
When a velvet-voiced Cassidy sings
Love songs that take wing!
Scratchy old records, I can hear
Who wants a Backstreet CD?
When from my old turntable I can hear
The endless happy sounds of days
When boomers roamed the frigid sea
And endless threats of Soviets
Roaming and plotting treachery
Oh, days when men wore fluffy hair
Long and wavy, they call it now-
Girly hair!  The slight of it!
When men like Shaun once danced
Long-haired and beautiful,
Into the velvet night
To have the days of Cold War back
And Watergate and spies
Is something no one wishes.
But all things have both dark and light,
And no one should judge
By the dark alone, though it be
Pitchy black, india ink.
When there is so much Light!
The light that was, the dawning Star
For men like David Cassidy-
And Mark Hamill, those stars
Who had something unknown today-
Something called a conscience,
That is what I want back!
I may have been born too late-
Twenty years back, I would have been
A happier person, no longer
Twenty years out of sync.
I saw Shaun, and I fell in love,
I saw his brother David, and I fell in love,
I ache to go back, to see this,
I know it's my past life speaking
A life when I was a screaming Shaun-fan
A life cut short too soon.
Was this the life that I remember,
In dreams of fire-I think it was.
Cut short too soon, I think I might
If some all-powerful being
Gave me a choice, to have;
The life I know now, a teen of 2000
Or to stop that fateful fire
That freed the immortal soul that is me
From my old Cassidy-fan body-I know
What path I should choose
I want to hold my own memories,
Of David's pinups and Shaun's records
I want to remember the night
This ageless sould first saw Star Wars
I want to remember the Seventies,
I want to remember my crushes,
On Shaun and David,
Leif Garrett and Mark Hamill
I want to be able to know me!


Written July 29, 2000 and dedicated to everyone who ever was a Cassidy fan.