Upon applying for college, I was really stressed out with the money situation..especially since I assumed I would be out of state. Everything is so expensive and in this economy and with our government at the time (Bush Administration)...it's like we have nothing..no privacy, no money, no nothing. So from this came the poem Downturn.
This fixed income is not enough to live on
in this country.Each child
is just a liability,
a painted tax.
The letter arrives in shreds,
Not to my surprise.
The envelope has lost its’ seal
and it’s obvious what is ours
is not a secret anymore.
The wires have tapped straight through to our brains,
performing the paranormal,
reading our every thought,
I wonder if they find our trivial gossip
worth the ears of the FBI.
I’m almost certain I’m the bomb,
ticking and exact.
I’m round as a zero,
but lacking a few decimal places.
Maybe they’ll come after me,
pilfer my house, family, and college tuition.
In the night now, I can only write by candle-light,
but the truth is, I can’t adapt
Obviously though, we have adapted to this, though our living isn't comfortable. Hopefully we find a way out of this soon. I put my trust in Obama. Hopefully at the end of these next four years, we'll see the light.
Obviously, I have not kept up with this at all...but it's a new year, so it's time to try a resolution...and I say try because the odds of me keeping it are probably slim, but hey, we all have busy lives right? So this poem was written for the poetry club I'm in at ASU called LUX. LUX is this literary magazine in the Barrett Honors College and they started a small poetry group to just share poetry and get feedback. It's a really great club. I read my poems out loud for the first time there. The group was so inspiring and their feedback was great. It honestly helped my writing. Anyways, each week we would have a prompt. The prompt for this one was to write a list poem, so that's what I attempted in The Company of Musical Notes. It's written about an ex, as a lot of my poetry is, so bear with me haha.
Treble clefs and the turning of tables,
The reminiscing of clubs,
The bars, and the hotel rooms.
The taste of smoke on your breath,
The monotonous tone that covered
your every depth.
The gauged ears and rubber bands,
the tattooed wish, and smirking eyes.
The two cars parked in front,
Your house, the second on the right,
The demons stirring under your bed
That only surfaced at night
The farewell serenade that repeated days
at a disco; the callous dreams that stained
your hands, the plane tickets that
were rammed into mine
and how this summer spent
was too consuming to define.
The catch-phrases during the aftermath,
the messages like comets,
lost orbiting in space.
The unresponsive waves, the glares, the rage,
the intense realization
that this maturity arrives with age.
Besides this, I wanted to share some other poetry related news. These past few days I started getting inspired, so I decided to take my poetry and put it into a book! All my favorite poems from my teens are now available in a single anthology on Lulu. I did it mainly for me, but if it happens to sell..well, that would be amazing. Here's the link and you can all check it out! My book is titled Skipping Rocks.
