Write One for Me

I'm drowning in poetry. Tomorrow is my Modern English Poetry midterm and I have been immersed in Yeats, Eliot, Auden and company all weekend. Yesterday, I was sitting on my bed working, when I was reminded of one of the first poems I ever wrote. My fifth grade teacher made us all write limericks. This is what I wrote:

There once was a girl named Tess
Who really loved to play chess.
She bought a Happy Meal,
The french fries were stale,
And she got ketchup all over her new dress.

(Evidence of just how indoctrinated my generation was. Morgan Spurlock would've been all over that.)

Now, I was aware that "meal" and "stale" didn't rhyme, but I was pretty shifty and when reading it aloud, I pronounced it in such a way that they did rhyme. The teacher liked it but then she asked me to repeat the last words of each line so everyone could see how the rhyme scheme worked. My cover was blown. Dammit.

My poetry has improved since then. A little. Not much, hehe. Actually, I come up with some good stuff sometimes but it's only the intensely personal stuff, and consequently, the only poetry anyone has ever read by me is complete and utter crap. Today I e-mailed three poems to Fellow #8, who will be known as Editor-In-Chief from now on because it's less confusing. She's the E.I.C. of the women's magazine that I also work on, and a good friend of mine. I know I've mentioned her before. Anyway, I sent her three poems for our upcoming December issue, and two of them were about my father's accident. I mean, per-so-nal. But I figured, whatever, it's art, and it's not like people don't know what happened anyway. (I recently found out that the President of the college alluded to it in her Convocation speech, only she didn't use my name.) She e-mailed me back and said that the one that I was most hesitant about sending got her all choked up. I guess you have to be true to yourself in order to produce art that's of any value. That, and you can't be afraid to let people see it, to be vulnerable. Or something like that.

Okay, back to my books and cup o' decaf.