Idle Thoughts

I used to write poetry. I've been writing random things for almost as long as I can remember. Little stories about aliens and dinosaurs when I was in elementary school, pretend newspaper articles, and when I was around 14 I actually completed a novel that was an absurd amalgam of basically every trope from Star Wars, Star Trek, and probably any other science fiction novel/movie/television show I had seen or read up to that point. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I feel like it took me a really long time to settle on a writing style that really fits my voice, and it was not to be found in fiction or poetry but in essays and research. But for a long time I thought I wanted to be a novelist, indeed assumed that I eventually would be, and it wasn't for lack of trying or confidence that shook this desire from me, it was my own wearied feeling that this simply wasn't for me - a hard feeling to swallow when you've been heading in a certain direction for years. Poetry came a little bit later and coincided with the time in my life that I thought my interests would be steered from the writing of literature to the study of it. This was from somewhere between late junior year in high school to around mid sophomore year in college. I don't really know why I started writing but I filled a couple of notebooks in the three or so years I wrote. Most of them, as could be expected from a 17 year old, were pretty terrible. The notebooks are probably somewhere at my parents house, I honestly don't know. However, while rifling through an old box of notes from college the other day, I happened to find a few poems that I turned in for a creative writing class I took in the summer of 2001. Usually, when I find things I wrote in years past I'm confronted with a feeling somewhere between embarrassment and pride, not in the work itself, but in how far I've come as a writer since then. However, I read this poem I wrote that summer and was actually rather impressed with what I had done. It doesn't really "mean" anything as far as I can tell, and if I can remember correctly I was just playing around with language when I wrote it. So, for all you literary critics that read this blog, don't feel like you need to look to deeply into it. I just thought I'd share since, as I said, I'm kind of surprised that I wrote this.

Idle Thoughts

1

Upwards reaching,
Inner is towards.
Many who may know me outwards
Are changing inwards.

2

Through one naked whisper
The ghostly heart is warmed--
Unaccustomed to the cold
Conversation, love is freed.

3

Returning those gray laughs
Was a subconscious eternity
Of the softest afternoons.

4

Glimpse the mastery enclosed:
Should I dare remain my
Own weakness,
Or change the mask I wear?

5

Precisely where childhood
Crossings were, punctured walls
Between fears were not.

6

"Never sigh," I thought just once,
Numbly wanting someone.
Love wasn't really found.
Never whisper what you say.

7

Love is the most covetous desire,
Erupting over mountains, but
Beginning in night's shadows.