I had planned to post a few poems I wrote some years ago. I’m not very good at poetry, but I’m not horrible either. Or maybe I am. To be a skilled a poet, a really good one, you have to read a ton of poetry, and that’s just something I will likely never do. It’s not that I dislike reading poetry; I only enjoy it in small doses. After five or six poetry classes, and being a poetry editor for a literary magazine, and reading more poetry on my own time, I consider myself somewhat knowledge and somewhat well read. I know about forms and meters and rhyme schemes and lots of that silly poetry jargon that makes you sound somewhat intelligent and pompous, but I still don’t think I know good poetry, or at least how to write it. I know what I like, so I suppose that’s good enough.
I like Joseph Bruchac—The Deer are Calling Us is probably my favorite poem—and I love T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock as it’s so horribly depressing yet realistic, revealing so much of the human condition. Ginsberg’s America is of course fantastic, and pretty much everything by Whitman and Frost and Poe is good in my book, though I very much prefer Poe’s works of fiction. I also enjoy Yeats and William Carlos Williams and Sherman Alexie. I guess I enjoy more poets than I presumed, and some poems have had very real impacts on me, especially the first two I mentioned. Mostly, I like poems that are stories, that tell about someone, or something, rather than poems about that are intentionally vague and confusing and melodramatic. I’m looking at you, Pound and most of the romantics.
All that said, I really don’t understand poetry. I think it’s something very few people get and many people pretend to get. Regardless, I never shut up in poetry classes, since I just love discussing all forms of media. I wish I was in a book club. My friend and I sort of joked about creating one, but it’s difficult to start a book club with a friend you never speak to, so that failed rather miserably. Until the future, I suppose.
Returning to the first sentence…I had planned to post a few poems, but those poems seemed to have been lost. I cannot find them on any computer, and as for the copies I printed out, they seem to be lost as well. That leaves me poemless, so I decided to write one, and that failed miserably as well. Turns out I’ve read like…five poems in the past year—and one was a poem written by my friend, only she doesn’t know I read it, as this was before she was my friend, but I suppose she’ll know now if she still reads this blog, which is somewhat amusing. Also, it was a rather good poem; I was surprised—which is not at all conducive to writing poetry. I wrote a few stanzas and erased them over and over again, disgusted with myself and having no idea in what direction I was heading, if any. Sigh. Poetry is so much harder than it seems.
I had no idea what to write about, so I decided to put on Pandora and write a poem about the first song title that came on. Well, first was Aback, by my favorite ambient band, Hecq. However, I could not write a poem about Aback. Fuck that. Following, Sequence Li came on. Amazing ambient song, but really, what the fuck does that even mean? How was I supposed to write a poem about Sequence Li? I didn't know, but then I did, suddenly, as an idea sprung to mind. I present you
Sequence Li
The song played out from beneath
Clogged gutters and rusted sinks and the bronze head
of a blind bull without its horns.
When everything crumbled and collapsed
and the world shook and rumbled,
and buildings tumbled to their roots,
the song played on.
The song of death
those dead by the song named it
before dying to the droned notes so monotone.
A buzz, and a clap, a beep
that went on and on to a beat
lost in the cacophony of catastrophe
received from deep within the stars
and planets supposedly without populace
or intellect, but at least with music
or what is very near to music.
It is a song, a sequence,
so it must be music.
Fitting. That the last song,
played out from beneath
silver spoons and waterless waterbeds,
loveless loveletters and a waning moon,
plays unheard in silence. Silence.
I’m almost embarrassed to post poetry on this blog, but at least it took me roughly ten minutes so it’s not like I put my soul into this piece of work…and I did write about Sequence Li of all things. This title was better than the next…Confidence Killed My Spirit. That would have been the most emo poem ever, or at least it would try to do be. It’s not like I haven’t posted far more embarrassing things for the world to read, for god knows the world is reading this blog, and even better that I lack the ability to feel embarrassment anyway. That went away with sanity.
The title, and idea of Sequence Li, is starting to frighten me.
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