Skip to main content

A Poet, I Know It

This, my friends, is the first poem I ever wrote. It was a homework assignment for pre-AP English in eighth grade; Mrs. Bundy's class. It was meant to be a poem written from words (I think we had to select ten or so) found in Elie Wiesel's Night. This evening, I had dinner with my mother, and she spoke to me about my writing over the years and how she always felt I was a natural poet. Well, it got me thinking, and I ended up spending the last few hours honing my sleuthing skills to find the back-ups sent to me years ago from my forum and pathetic.org. Only problem, I couldn't remember the name of the website, nor which email address I used all those years ago to set it up (I started writing poetry in 2001 and started broadcasting my work around 2003-2004, so basically, my 25-year-old mind had to reach back to my 13-year-old mind and figure out who the hell I was again). But, I came up with all of the answers I sought and more. I haven't been happier in weeks!--except, possibly, when spending any amount of time whatsoever with my puppy. Anyway, I found the backup with a good chunk of the old stuff, and this poem was in there, waiting to be remembered. 

Into the ghetto,
Settled for keeping,
Kept so “safe” from the foe.
Settlement?
No!
Expulsion!
Expulsion to hell!
Hell, there is no mercy.
No mercy for His children.
No mercy there.
Hell, where suffocation begins.
At the gates of hell.
Hell on Earth…
Auschwitz.
A mere furnace.
Burning hysterically.
The abominable stench settles on a haggard soul.
Where humanity slips from existence.
Slips away in vain.
Never before a faint so silent.
Screaming the name on liberty.
For revenge.
Cursing the bell.
The order of life.
Crying for orders to be lost.
For a world free of such agony.
For a world without.
Bitter.
So silent.
Hanged with the gallows.
Never.
Never such a fate so numbered!
Numbered to become ash!
To be the smoke in the air.
Haggard faces of anguish.
What’s left on the bone.
Unseen souls falling away.
Away into the bitter sweet night.
Silence.
Morphine.
Liberating the pain.


And, this, my friends, is the last poem I ever wrote (officially), but I am wondering if that will soon change.


Will you be
the Body, warm in my bed:
my Somebody
to come home to?
Will you be
the quiet Sunday mornings:
my Saturday cartoons?

You can 
pick me up--
anytime
you want to.


The only problem I foresee, is that I was never a planner, never a strict editor or a long-ponderer of what felt right or what message I was creating. I always just wrote when I needed to write. And sometimes I resented it, thinking it kind of cliche and childish. I always thought poetry was second-best to prose, and fancied myself a novelist over a poet any day. But, these days, I kind of miss it. And I see where I was wrong. I don't know, maybe it is still childish of me, but maybe that is why it is so important. So, maybe soon the inspiration will hit me, and I'll be a poet once more.

(also, I reapplied with pathetic.org--incidentally, if you are inactive for something like seven years, they tend to forget you like you forgot them and delete your profile and all your poems, luckily I found the back-ups--so if they once again accept me, you will be able to go there and read whatever I write when I write it, and whatever I wrote before that I feel like claiming as my own again)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I-5

On a chilly Sunday evening in mid-January, two young women rolled up to the TransAmerica Title Building on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, just off Interstate 5, to clean the office. It was their usual Sunday job, though today they had gotten a bit of a late start, having to shower and stop for gas, so they didn't arrive to the business complex until after nine p.m. The office had wide, welcoming windows on every wall and, with the bright florescent lights flipped on, the effect was to create a fishbowl-like scene, the women bustling around in their duties like two busy, little fish. They'd left the door unlocked and entertained themselves by chatting to each other, the two of them best friends. They were Shari Hull, twenty-years-old and the daughter of the owner of the housekeeping company with which they were both employed, and Beth Wilmot, also twenty and a fairly recent transplant to Salem from Spokane, Washington. She'd come for work, and along with steady pay, she...
2 comments
Read more

By the Barrel of a Silver Gun (I-5 Part Two)

In early February of 1981, authorities from Salem flew down the Interstate 5 corridor and assembled with detectives and law officials from northern California and southern Oregon. Each detective had a crime, or two, in their jurisdiction matching a particular modus operandi , and the list of incidents just kept growing. When they gathered, they had no idea the scope of the mystery they were unraveling or just far it was going to reach. It started with a robbery. On December 9, 1980, in Vancouver, Washington, a gas station was held up at gun point, the female attendant left alone in the store. A man entered wearing a brown coat and a fake beard. He demanded cash and brandished a small, silver gun to prove he was serious. The cashier obliged.  A few days later, in Eugene, Oregon, on December thirteenth, a Baskin-Robbins was robbed by a man holding a silver gun and wearing a fake beard and a band aid across his nose.  In Albany, Oregon, a drive-in was hit on Dec...
2 comments
Read more

Wah Mee Massacre

On a chilly February night, five days after the start of the Chinese New Year, 1983, three young men walked into one of the most renowned, high-stakes gambling dens in the heart of Seattle's Chinatown International District and walked away with thousands of dollars of cash in their pockets and fourteen lives hanging in the balance in their wake.  The club was the Wah Mee, a sixty-year-old casino and bar that catered exclusively to Chinese clientele and hosted the highest-stakes illegal gambling in the Pacific Northwest. The men were 22-year-old Kwan Fai "Willie" Mak, 20-year-old Benjamin Ng, and 25-year-old Wai Chiu "Tony" Ng.  Willie Mak was born in Kwangtung Province in mainland China and immigrated to the US with his family in 1975 when he was fifteen. By 22, Willie was a high school drop out, working various jobs in and around Seattle, and had a penchant for gambling. He was well-known in the International District gambling clubs, including the Wah Me...
2 comments
Read more