Poems.

I just want to clear up
some confusion.

These blog posts

are

definitely

not

poems.

I do not write poems.

I have prose

running through my veins.

I write posts this way

because I have an aversion

to large blocks of text.

A strong aversion.

As in,
I-don't-care-
how-interesting-you-are-
I'm-not-gonna-read-anything-
unless-you-give-me-some-white-space.

But.

Once upon a time,

I used to write poems.
Sometimes.

High school, you know?

Here's one:

Pull the bow smoothly now,

Like a rake in a zen garden.

Curve your chin now,

With the arc of the sugar bowl handle.

Press the strings

Till your fingers bleed,

Like you press the keys of that old typewriter

Just to hear the click-clack of the past.

And play, now! Play!

Concert halls await you now,

With packed houses of bow ties

And fur coats,

Ready to sift you to nothing

With their classically-trained ears.

Oh give up, now! Give up!

Grab that violin by the neck

And make a fiddle of it.

Climb up onto the roof of your house

And play to the birds!

The birds, now!

Who are squawking and cheeping

As they hurry south

For the winter.

A little story about this.

On a whim,

I entered that poem

into a contest for the lit mag

in high school.

And one day,

they read my name

on the morning announcements,

saying that I had won

some prize.

The heads of everyone in homeroom

turned to look at me.

For four years,

I'd done everything I could

to not draw any attention to myself.

And suddenly 

all these people

who didn't necessarily really know

who I was

knew that I wrote poems.

I was mortified.

All day people congratulated me,

and I wanted to slip underneath

the linoleum floor tiles.

By the next day,

everyone had forgotten my fame.

And I never even got a copy

of the magazine

to see my work in print.

So yeah.

I don't write poems.

That year,

I was doing a picture of the day project.

This is the picture from that day.

I captioned it,

"Wednesday, March 25.

Oh, the shame."

Funnily enough,

I am wearing that sweatshirt

as I type this.