Will begin with a bang, hopefully. Take me to the future where I can plan stuff on this day every year, the gap between July and August that’s somehow found a place in my heart as a pivotal time.
At this time four years ago I was about to begin writing poetry for my first girlfriend. You never think something like that could become so juvenile and meaningless. You might recall I’ve mentioned Virgo Olympus was the first poem I wrote with the specific intent to make a poem, not just a love letter with lines and stanzas.
There’s a difference between love poetry and being ignorant. So there’s that. My whole Year One catalogue is laughable because it’s all very… 15 year old me? Yeah, that’s why.
That in mind, here’s an excerpt from something awful I wrote for my first girlfriend that we can all cringe at together! This one’s from a ‘poem’ called “I Will Go On”:
“Paint-splattered, a little weathered,
Heavy make-up, a little shake up,
A bit worn, or grit and grime,
No, there’s never a time where you don’t
Look beautiful, my love!”
Fucking shoot me already. I sighed deeply having to read any part of this again. So, you might get some sense of rhythm from the commas there, but the intent when I wrote it was to go for a showtune kind of air. I think I hit the mark there, but I can’t really tell because of how much it makes me cringe.
I also can’t tell what exactly causes my irk at these older poems. They were written entirely genuinely, but looking back I can’t help but feel like I’m watching a train wreck in progress. It could be one of a few things that does that, though; the person, the context, myself, or the ignorance.
I think the sense of passion you feel in your first love is the thing that’s making me not like reading these. It comes with a sense of “If only I knew” how minuscule the feelings would be. You know, when you’re 15, it feels like your first love is the height of emotion. It’s when that feeling gets taken away I think that you can really understand some emotional depths.
Don’t believe me? Go read “Armor Gone” and see how that compares to anything from Year One.
It could be that patience and time has done the trick just as well. Four years is a lot of time to learn what you can feel as a human being and how to express it. It’s a very hard lesson that you have to learn and make it through. I’ve come from thinking Puyallup must be the largest, most spread out city in the world to driving to Ellensberg on a Friday for the hell of it.
Going into year four. It’s kinda crazy to me that I’ve been doing this whole poetry thing for that long, and that I’ve had these ideas for expression for that long. This slight writer’s block I’ve been feeling lately is giving me so many ideas in my notebook, though. When the veil finally lifts I’ll be back in action.
Aaaand I’ve got a new camera lens on the way! No more being stuck between 18 and 55 millimeters, we’re going up to 300!
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