Journaling has all but devoured the energy I once devoted to the composition of poetry. Most of these are older poems I don't
mind admitting to having written. A few are taken out of one of my books. The rest were primarily written tongue-in-cheek,
so don't read into them too deeply, okay? 'Mediocre poet' here means I have a reasonable grasp on the concepts of rhyme and
meter. I know what is hackneyed, what rhymes sound forced, and am perfectly capable of composing verse at will whenever
the situation demands it. However, I tend to neglect my poetry in favor of long prose, and so I have not progressed to level of
truly remarkable poets like Beth. Sometimes I end up adding poetry to my prose to flesh out the worlds about which I write
my stories. These are the occasional narratives, lyric poems, and songs that spontaneously emerge when I get mugged by my
muse. Some, I am really quite proud of. Others have a few good turns of phrase. The rest are pretty much drek written in a
fit of passion, like drunken one-night stands. I'll leave the third hidden in the dark recesses of my computer's last surviving
hard drive.
What happens when you combine three sensitive freshmen and a freaky bridge over nothing during an odd-colored full moon a few days before Halloween? Poe-etic poetry, apparently. This was the result.
Originally intended as a circle of four songs - Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night - only this and Night actually turned out fairly well.
This is the companion to "Dawn". I really like the way the two are musical mirror images. This song settles in a spooky minor key, while "Dawn" sounds like a religious hymn.
I have written my share of moralistic poetry, but this one made me write it. I kept hearing this song in my head that I didn't recognize. After about a month, all the one-liners I had ever said about the Devil gelled in my mind and used the mysterious melody as its mode of expression. It was a heavy metal song I wrote before I really listened to heavy metal. It was also the kind of poem that would have worried the faculty and parents of my Catholic high school, so it never appeared in Poetic License.
A song written in English when I was still a Senior in high school and written again in Middling Gaian my Junior year of college. The translation is helpful, but not even close to the same rhythm, Gaian being a language in which adjectives tend to be part and parcel of the nouns they modify. It's prettier sung.
This is about the mysterious power of creativity. My favorite part is the last four-line stanza. I can take or leave the rest.
An intensely personal and spiritual song. You can definitely hear the echoes of hymns in the music and lyrics of this one. I unconsciously lifted a few four-bar phrases from some of my favorite hymns, which lends it a very familiar and comforting sound to my ear.
This comes out of one of the books of The Caligrean to capture the oral tradition of the Mar, but it managed to reflect something of myself, as well. My friends seldom visit me with any expectation of getting to sleep, especially if I haven't seen them in a long time.
One of my first poems, originally written when I was a Sophomore in high school, this is still one of my favorites. Perhaps it is because it was the first poem I put to music, as well. A hopeless morality play, but not bad for a kid who, at the time, was mostly writing love poetry as bad as any that Poetic License ever published.
An extended metaphor hot out of my brain and probably in dire need of revision, once I come down from the high of my first poem in nearly a year.
This is a three-stanza adhi chain. It is also one of the few love poems I've written that is not a complete embarrassment to me now.
Not a terrible love poem, I think, because it touches on something far more universal, something that makes sense even outside of a romantic context.
Two roleplaying poems and one poem from the point of view of my ex-fiancee at the time. With apologies to Nykki Giovanni, whose poetic form we were assigned to imitate...
My ultimate wanderlust poem, which I wrote and put to music my Senior year in high school, complete with character voices
(noted by the non-bold words).
My first experiment with the sonnet, this one was just plain fun to write.
This poem has more history than words. It came about as the result of the need of my high school's literary magazine for a bad poem to rip apart. Since we did not want to upset one of the poor young poets who so often submitted dreadful, angsty love and depression poetry that we often printed simply to fill the monthly quota, I set out to write our own victims - one of my first attempts at poetry on demand - with an anonymous byline. This became the infamous result. Once Poetic License was published that month, we kept receiving questions about "Elbow". I even got a few concerned queries by writers worried their poetry would be to picked apart for all the school to see as "Elbow" had been. In the end, I was forced to come clean, and admit that I had written a completely ridiculous poem deliberately. I never quite lived it down.
This was aimed to instruct by showing how bad love poetry can get. I have a love/hate relationship with love poetry. I love writing it, but I hate reading it once I'm done.
I created the adhi form when I was a freshman in college as the "sonnet of The Caligrean". But I have found it lends itself well to riddles, as well.
Another adhi riddle, this one might be familiar to some of the regulars on GCP. It is also a tribute of sorts.
Short and to the point, it is clear I wrote this one when I wasn't in love with anyone.
A no truer poem could I have written about myself than this.