Sunday, January 11, 2009

The Poet

I used to want to be a poet. Well, to be fair, I wanted to be a rapper first. Yeah-huh. When I was in high school, I got turntables, practiced break dancing, and wanted to rap. I wrote rap lyrics to a song from my friends' band. They were in a jam band. Yeah. I wrote rap lyrics to a jazz-fusion jam band song. I was a star-crossed rapper, OK? Lay off.

Anyway, I gradually moved from that to wanting to be a slam poet. Have you ever seen the movie Slam? It's pretty good. It features Saul Williams who is to slam poetry what Savion Glover is to tap dancing. So I wanted to do that - be on stage, rapping without music, essentially. Performing.

From there, I decided I wouldn't mind actually being, you know, a real poet. Deep. Introspective. Mysterious. Sexy. What girl wouldn't want to strip off her clothes and jump the bone of a bad ass, harley davidson riding, poet with a sensitive heart? (Since I already had the sensitive heart, I just needed the bike, a few "bad ass" classes (maybe a leather jacket), and for someone to call me a poet. Someone other than my mom.)

I had notebooks full of poetry. Really really bad poetry. Cringe worthy. Some, maybe even puke worthy. For my first girlfriend when I was 17, the night before her first day of school I scattered rose petals on her seats, put two long stem roses in her steering wheel, and taped a two page, typed poem with four line stanzas and an ABCB rhyming pattern. Trust me, if I still had a copy of that poem, I'd post it for you right now. Self-deprecation is the name of the game.

Unfortunately, you'll have to settle for this little gem I wrote sophomore year of college for an intro to poetry class with a professor who occasionally took me a few other people onto the roof of the building to get high. Here it is for your enjoyment:

Feels Good

"I take a 2x4 to my head ‘cause it feels good.
Stood blood drip from my ears when a scream shook
Foundations of my soul and cataclysms of isms
For belief structures forcing frustration facin’
Annihilation of independent thoughts.

"Blood boils to exception in insult stew
With iris fires pouring down their sulfurous gaze
To be hazed by the constricting grasp that I construed
And last beyond my imagination to self deprecation defecating on my head.

"I belong to a class of perfection vexin’ me
Intellectual perplexity using tears for dissecting me
Runnin’ from society because love’s a bitch
That tears the stitches of reality
A mere parody of what’s supposed to be
So please don’t berate me with your arrogant belligery
‘Cause I do more shit to myself than you could ever dream."


Now let's dissect some of my favorite lines, shall we? As I'm sure we can see, rhyming was the absolute most important element to this piece. Content was, um, less than important, shall we say.

First of all, as with most poems I've ever written, this one grew from the first line. There was no concept, no overriding theme, and none, really, was ever installed. I just thought up, "I take a 2x4 to my head 'cause it feels good" and tried to figure out what would sound cool after that. Stood rhymes! Blood (almost) rhymes, if you read it like a moron. Shook, well, it rhymes better than blood.

I actually still like "cataclysms of isms." I'll go to the mat for that little guy.

Hey guys! News flash. Our "belief structures" are killing our independent thoughts! No, sorry. Actually, they're just forcing frustration. But I'm not entirely sure what our belief "structures" are. Is that religion? Churches? Capitol Hill? Am I talking about symbolic buildings? "Belief structures?" Hmm. This poem is deeper than I thought. Moving on...

"Blood boils to exception?" Anybody?

Now that whole second stanza is a pretty convoluted mind twister. And actually, the first line has absolutely nothing to do with the next three. "Iris fires pouring down their sulfurous gaze/To be hazed by the constricting grasp that I construed..." So "iris fires" - I'm gonna go with prying eyes. Being stared at. By stoners. Got it. "To be hazed by the constricting grasp"? Um...the irises are being hazed? By a grasp? That I made? I made this constricting grasp that is now hazing the irises of pot heads? That seems like a silly thing to have made.

But the next line may be my favorite of the whole: "And last beyond my imagination to self deprecation defecating on my head." Now that's just messy.

In terms socio-economic class, apparently, I've been placed in a class of perfection. OK. That sounds rather fortunate. Until you find out that it's "vexin' me." Because nobody really wants to be vexed. Not for long, at least. Maybe just a little after dinner.

And the intellectual perplexity is using tears to dissect me. I'm pretty sure that doesn't make any sense at all. Why is the perplexity crying? Why are its tears like scalpels? These are the questions that need to be asked, I think.

"Runnin' from society because love's a bitch/That tears the stitches of reality." So many things. First of all, I'd like to note the stunning colloquialism in the vernacular of this poem as G's are so casually dropped from the ends of words to make it all sound so much more natural; honest. Now suddenly, our character, the masochistic, constricting grasp construer, vexed perfection class member is on the run from Johnny Law, from society, why? Because "love's a bitch." I think Shakespeare wrote that. Or was it Miller? Brecht? No, I think it was Julia Roberts.

I'd like also to note the use of the heteronym "tears," the first of which referred to the saline, watery fluid secreted by the lacrimal glands between the surface of the eye and the eyelid, often flowing from the eye as a cause of intense emotion and, in this case, apparently used to dissect me, and the second example being the verb meaning to rip, in this case, the stitches of reality. The latter example, it could even be argued, was used as a form of dissection. You see? This is where I get particularly clever - while the heteronym "tears" has two different meanings and two different pronunciations, both uses of the word act in the same way. Brilliant!

Never mind the "love's a bitch" or "tears the stitches of reality" clichés. We've firmly established and supported my brilliance.

Now, when I showed this poem to the small writers group that met outside of class late at night with our professor who would occasionally smoke us out on the roof of our English building, one of the group members said that by saying "more than you could ever dream," I was setting an impossible mark because one's dreams are typically limitless and while you might not think of it, when prodded, you could almost certainly dream of a lot of "shit," so really, what is it you do that's "more than I could dream?" And I said, please don’t berate me with your arrogant belligery. Word.


So why didn't the poetry thing work out? I mean, with such stunning wordsmithery, how is it that I'm not already one of the literary community's most prized commodities? I'll never know. It's a tough world out there. But I've moved on to screenplays. And I'm almost positive I'm a better screenwriter than I was a poet.

Almost.

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