It reads: “Jump in the raked leaves/ The weather is getting cold/ Big trees turning green”. This is a short poem I think I would have filled in in the first or second grade. Notice the lovely leaf cut-out, and the red coloring all around it in uneven, chunky crayon or colored pencil lines. Clearly there was a theme here, and I was proud to put my name on it.
So, the first two lines are pretty good. All’s going well, it sounds like autumn, things are going as expected. Then in the last fucking line, on the last fucking word, I go completely off the rails and end up not comprehending a god damn about autumn after all. “Big trees turning green”. GREEN? Fucking what? What the ever-loving fuck was I on about?
Ah! At first this could make some sense! I grew up in California! We have no seasons there! Maybe instead of being intentionally artsy I was alluding to the fact that that’s how autumn really was in San Bernardino. This could make sense. I was just being blunt, perhaps!
This could make sense, but one thing I do fondly remember is that the big tree in our front yard did in fact lose its leaves every year. There weren’t many evergreens by where I lived, so as I look back the entire displacement of this poem in one fucking word is insane. I wasn’t being blunt at all! Why the hell would I call the tree green?
Call me an idiot savant, but I highly doubt I was meaning anything philosophical or transcendental at 6 or 7 years old. If there wasn’t any point that I was diagnosed for anything, maybe that should have been the point my parents pulled me into a doctors office to make sure I wasn’t fucking colorblind.
Moving on, this looks to be not just a poem about autumn, it’s a HAIKU about autumn! There’s the line count: 5,7,5. And you know what, if we do want to turn this into some philosophical bullshit, then we can call this a proper damn haiku. For those uninitiated, haiku poems typically begin slowly and then become quite literally a ‘big picture’ or spiritual thing in the last line. The pivot from it being a rather small subject to a much larger one happens in the second line.
Maybe I did it on purpose! Maybe I was just a dumbass! Either way, I wrote a haiku about autumn at some point in my early elementary career. And you know, it did do its job really well, for me to immediately forget and never remember that this was something I wrote. Write, and move on. Write, and move on like a real creator.
Consume Reality! 