These are some poems I wrote during the last few years. Sadly, a notebook full of poems I wrote for a creative writing class a few years ago was stolen, including a poem about basketball and slam dunks which I really miss.
I often provide the reader with a number of "versions" of my poems in reverse chronological order, so she can follow the development process somewhat. As I have edited and refined (debugged?) the language till I am unable find obvious new ways to improve it -- or at least not terribly painful and lengthy ones. You may very well prefer a half-way version best. Sometimes the poem changes almost radically. It makes me wonder if I am moving toward what I originally wanted to say, or whether I got lost or even truly inspired along the way.
Truthfully speaking, I can admit that I really like to browse through this site and conveniently look at what I produced and compare and contrast. I hope some of you visitors will enjoy the same thing and let me know.
I don’t really consider myself a real poet at all, but words can be fun to play with sometimes, and these are some of the words I played with.
I give some descriptions or previews here for each poem. I am considering putting the descriptions on special, optional pages that visitors can link to, so people can read poems and then find out what I was thinking. On the other hand, how can someone have any idea which poem they would like to peek at without a few hints. Chicken? Egg? Let me know what you would like to see. Even if you don’t get to benefit, maybe the next visitor will.
The poems are:
A Nation of Snowmen: Odes to my schizophrenia.com chat room buddies.
Good Work: I started with the first few words and then got more inspired. The main idea being played with is the famous American work ethic.
Itch: The idea I had in mind was of a junkie in one of those boarded up buildings we see in many places going through withdrawal or something, really out of it and suffering but not dying, mostly waiting and thinking.
Parcel: Someone called this a "nice slice of life."
Speeches and Such: I don’t know, don’t ask. Did you ever have to give a speech? Did you ever wonder how all of those pols (politicians) do it all the time?
Closing the Book: Perhaps someone contemplating while looking into a pond in the park---at least that is what I had in mind.
The next two are quasi- or false- haikus. Yes, they are 5-7-5, the haiku form I learned in 5th grade.
Turtle Wax Haiku: This one is about human relationships (or at least one of them), which is a topic I don’t use as much as many like to do. Again, it is 5-7-5.
And Yuck is a description of nature
These are two true haikus I wrote one morning during a haiku mini-fest on an IRC poetry channel (chat room):
I wrote Moving Day quite a while ago and only shared it very, very recently. I made only punctuation changes before sharing this poem, which I hope have improved it a bit.
Attention: All Sophists, There is a problem, with many chatrooms, that I really despise, and this happens a lot in Undernet’s #politics channel.
flower.c, This is a poem written in the C programming language. It should even compile, run, and print out another poem. Nerdy, isn’t it?
Metaphor in Pavement: another exercise....
And that is all of them...for now.
Contact me at vicinage1970@outlook.com