Thursday, Nov. 28, 2002, 2:44 AM

The subject of poetry



I have been writing my entries whilst I sit in an overstuffed maroon recliner with the laptop appropriately sitting in my lap, and with the clock on the wall chiming the early hours of the morning. To date, in my entire life, this is now the longest continuous period of journal entries that I have ever maintained. I have owned many journals. They are all furiously scribbled in for a series of pages-five, ten, even twenty pages of flowing cursive text, or later, the stylized all capital block print that I adopted. They now reside with my past in boxes in the closet, at the bottom of drawers, mixed in with the pile of magazines on the end table next to the couch, in the cabinet with my Magic cards, or on shelves amongst my books. Little windows into the past. No, not really. They are more like this journal has become-little snippets of the mundane that is life, but more absorbed and consumed with the ramblings of my unsettled mind.

I dated a girl for several years in college who was a Creative Writing major, like me. She would always have journals in her room or about her person, and I would occasionally catch her reading them, and less frequently, adding to them. At some point, she began using my computer to write her papers, and occasionally write and print entries that she meticulously removed from the computer immediately after. It would be years before I discovered that she had also been writing poetry. Poetry about me. Here is a sample, reprinted without permission, and currently, without knowledge:

i want to ask
if your skin feels as good
on the inside
as it feels
on the outside

instead
i only
sit back
spread my legs
and watch the cartoons chase each other
through the blue haze
of your wanting eyes


Several years after this was written, and several years after I discovered it in the bowels of my computer this particular ex-girlfriend asked me to act as the Maid of Honor at her wedding. If you are male, then it is called Honor Attendant. It meant that I got to wear a tux that matched the ones worn by the men all standing next to the groom. It also means that I got to hold her bouquet when they exchanged vows and rings. There are still things that this particular girl alone will ever know about me, and even more that she alone will ever truly understand.

As I have grown it seems that I have also traveled further from the source of inspiration. It once coursed through my veins and mercilessly kept sleep at bay many a night. Emotions had more depth back then. Drama was real and feelings had a full-bodied taste that you could savor, or that would linger like a bad taste in the back of your throat. It saddens me to think that I may have been chasing the horizon for so long that I have terminally separated myself from my own emotional homeland.

But to know that I have been the subject of poetry, well, that is divine.