Wait… is that a baseball diamond back there?
Well, it’s been a time since I shared some poetry on here — what with law school and all — but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing it. It took gradual progress and drafting, but I started and finished this one after only a month or so into the winter semester! It sat on my hard drive for a while, passed around among friends, but I decided I should share it on here.
It’s about college, and part-time jobs, and literary journals. It’s about paranoia, and privilege, and not being totally sure who or what you want to spend life doing. It’s about girls — a million, or three, or maybe just one. It’s about videogames, the internet, and wishing you could talk with music and intense colors instead of text messaging and social cues.
Ironically, the poem “functions” best the fewer people read it — and yet, of course, I love to share my work and get feedback. So I hope you don’t take the title to heart too strongly when I say…
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This particular piece felt like a leap for me at first, but in retrospect it was a pretty logical progression. During and after writing a “literary self-portrait” in English last year, “An Easier Way to Get Out of Our Little Heads,” I realized how natural, cathartic, and yet… well, artistic it felt to write in a prose-poetry style–flitting between ideas and images, figures of speech and cultural references, yet wrapping it all back around around a core of feelings and thoughts that read as personal and yet relatable.
Looking back, I started letting poetry take over keeping a journal around the end of high school — a few stray verses or a whole poem every few months (admittedly, of varying objective quality) as a way of condensing my hopes, frustrations, and a handful of powerful memories into a structured yet sincere whole. So with this one, I decided to take everything I’d learned — and experienced — in the past few year, and try it again. It may be too early to self-declare a niche for my poetry, but I feel like I really found it with this one (is “love and philosophy for Millenials” too long a moniker?).
Notes&Sketches 