Here is a taste of my poetry encouraged by CRW 1131 at the University of Florida (Go Gators!!). I absolutely love this class. I enrolled in this course to challenge myself. I had not written anything of substance since high school and I wanted to get my creative juices flowing again.
NOTE: I refuse to capitalize the titles of my poetry, because I do not want my work to be judged solely by its title. I want my readers to search for the hidden meaning behind my expressions and be glad in them:
a foiled excurion
A pinkish-orangish-reddish hue
inched onto the horizon
as night crept out
of our minds—bodies, and tickled, as it leaped from our toes.
The air smelled honey, as we glided through it.
Our mood made it so.
We giggled and frolicked.
Packed and planned.
Today
was
our day.
Today we would be Albacore headed to warmer waters
Caterpillars emerging in colorfully costumes.
We were free.
But, it wasn’t our fate to be so.
Ash dulled the smile of the sun, but she shone on.
We? Continued to pack
crossing our fingers and toes
and arms and legs.
We were superstitious.
We held that poise for thirty seconds as the rhyme says
“Cross your fingers, eyes and toes hold that pose, bad luck goes.
With the thirty seconds done, you’ll be done, you’ll have won!”
But, as second twenty-nine approached
so did a big bully of a cloud
and the sun didn’t have a chance.
We hung our heads low, sulked and made corn shucking sounds with our feet
as we dragged them along the gritty tile.
We looked about as pitiful
as the squirrels did,
trying to dip and dodge raindrops.
They were sopping wet.
Our cheeks were, too.
We were baffled by the rhymes failure to thwart bad luck.
We stood scratching our heads
furrowing our brow
and vowed right then and there to remember to cross our eyes next time.
emotionless faces
An emotionless face against a sea of emotionless faces, they walk.
They walk in a crowd, yet in isolation.
Never noticing the stranger with the girlish giggle, masking her self-loathing tendencies.
Or the ill-tempered ol’ grump mumbling under his breathe, shrieking.
Shrieking, silently for affection, attention.
But, I can hear them.
I can hear them and see them and feel them and be them.
I.
Am.
Them.
And so are you.
We, are them.
And we don’t realize.
The wind?
It whispers to us, the truth.
The truth the sun, in her haughtiness attempts to disguise.
That bitch.
Her incandescence is blinding.
She mocks our very existence for she has imprisoned us.
Her radiance engulfs us and when she is in no mood to illuminate, gloom
billows and the sky weeps.
She is vengeful.
Only at night does she relinquish us from her treasonous clutches
for when we sleep, she sleeps.
It is then that our emotions are uninhibited. Free to run and romp.
Free to run and romp revealing their truths to our innermost consciousness
That we are the ol’ grump and the self-loathing girl.
We are the hopeless and the destitute.
We do not live sheltered from hurt by the suns embracing facade.
Our hurt tunnels deep within our core until the moon creeps onto the black
canvas of night and then,
and then,
and then escapes through our glazed windows, leaving paths of salt to remind
us of our oneness with one another.
resume
The barren sheet mocks me.
Its sterile emptiness longs for the dissimilar
The black of print, the giver of life.
The words are tossed and whipped around.
Grains of sand in the wind storm of my mind.
Un-uniformed.
No direction.
It haunts me.
I am to fill it with its lifeblood.
Fill it to the brim of its margins
Fill it until it is only a memory of what it once was.
The wind calms and the words drift onto the white ocean.
Caressing the page.
Tip-toeing across the surface.
But soon sink into a hazy abyss of inferiority.
