Old poems

[violetcheetah]

After writing the short story I posted earlier this week, I ended up digging through my computer folders of old poetry, because I have a vague recollection of the story beginning as a prose poem, and now that I've written the first draft, I kinda wanted to go back and read what I wrote back then and laugh at how horrible it was, but also see how it began, and what I've forgotten, and what's changed.  I didn't find it, but, well, I have a lot of old poetry, mostly crappy, and most of it has numbers for the filenames, because I'd written it in emails to friends back when email was plain text on a dialup connection to a Unix platform, so if I'd kept a poem that was the 33rd message in my "CC" folder, then 33 was the filename.  Well, the "poems" folder didn't have it, but it was... informative.  And it might be in another folder, but I gave up.

In the meantime, I thought, hey, I should post some of the stuff I wrote when I was writing poems.  The stuff that doesn't suck that much — which mainly means the dozen or so I wrote for a grad school class — and maybe at some point some of the crappier, rawer stuff, with commentary on what I remember of what was going on at the time.  Kinda of pre-writing for the next sections of the memoir.

Anyway, even before that, I'd been thinking of posting this one, because at least my grad school professor thought it was good, and because it's apropos to the memoir.  It was written fall term of 1997.

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Cuneiform

The flesh on my arm is soft like wet clay,
but it doesn't give the same.
Letters pressed didn't last;
she had to go deeper to leave her words.
So she used an exacto, scalpel blade,
to carve her life right here.
I dabbed the blood as it filled each inscription
so she could see clearly:
it's an exacting alphabet,
and she wanted to be neat
so as never to be misunderstood.

Then she was gone
without teaching me her language.