Like any other artsy, pretentious teenager, I wrote the occasional poem. Most of them were frighteningly awful. What follows is one of the least terrible of those poems.
Interestingly, it’s one of the very few poems I wrote after I’d graduated high school. It’s also perhaps the poem with the least “life is soooooo unfair” teen angst.
Basically, it’s about the relationship between me and one of my best friends, James. The first part is about a heated discussion went got into about life and dreams one night at the St. Charles Deli in Virginia Highland. The second part recalls the (drunken) night several years earlier when we first really bonded at a party at Lake Lanier. The final part is about the drunken night I wrote the first two parts (oooooh! META!).
Read it, if you dare, after the jump:
I.
And he looked over at me in the well-lit deli and said,
“You know, dreams are when the consciousness is stripped of its flesh
And all life blood revolves around the mind.”
I stared at him over the rim of a coffee cup with bright-tailed eyes
“Surely you must be kidding! ” I cried.
“Dreams are nothing but the outtakes from your mind. Dreams rank but
Only as the random alchemy of sleep.”
He must then have been upset for he turned to me,
Looking as if I’d destroyed his innermost sanctum.
“At the point of the dream,” he began, “is where your body lies
Most vulnerable to the forces of life. God and Satan and
That sort of thing.
How in the world could you ever have said that?”
I only stared at his unrested body
As he fumbled for his cigarettes.
Oh yes, our entrees had long since gone away to their final place
As we sat and talked.
She was there as well, listening, and joining in our ramblings at times.
And, as he blew smoke up into the air I replied,
“But our course your mind and body are separate when you sleep!
Think you ever me this childish?
And I am, to be more accurate,
Implying that your mind is devoid of thinking as we sleep, so…”
By then he had interrupted me (which was not unusual for James).
“Dreams are a third of your consciousness…”
He began again as Evelyn1 took up the discussion.
II.
But what elements had made up this hot August night.
My head was reeling, the only common denominator
That hot, humid August night at a lake,
Was the strain of Mozart’s many violins rushing at light speed
Through my mind.
“This is the part that I was telling you about the businessmen…”
He began again.
The car pulsed forward as the tape rolled on.
“And now he’s talking about the British Army…”2
As we pulsated (for that my mind was sure)
On top of the world (our own world at any rate, for
Later our world was to be exploded by many tiny battles.
These battles merged finally into one monumental war.
Simply put, a war of minds. As it seemed, I was content to float in
Nothingness and space and sing songs from sixty miles east)3.
We sat and talked and threw beer cans at cars and laughed;
My life did not seem impressed at the time, and wasn’t later, either,
For the food that comes in rolled cans and immersing yourself
(A baptism of sorts, actually)
And the flow of blood were to come later.
Finally he turned to me and asked,
“So what do you think love is?”
(Yes, the reader will point out that he asked a question
And, for that matter, said nothing).
So I pondered my life once more, remembering that just a week ago
We had conversed on the same topic sitting on the sidewalk.
Finally, through all of my cluttered closets of thoughts,
I managed to answer him as intelligently as possible:
“At this point in time, I can offer you no answer
Of substance. Nor, I believe, will I be able to converse with you
Much longer at this point. But do, by all means, go ahead.”
So he turned his head to look at the ever closer water and
Then turned up to the sky to have his eye collide with a raindrop.
Finally, after much apparent deep thought he turned and slowly said:
“Love is trying to touch another person’s soul. It is very fully and
Totally futile, of course, but that’s what human beings, homo sapiens,
To be exact, are programmed to do.”
“Yes, there it is, my friend. You’ve put your finger right on it!”
My mind was cluttered to the point that I was trying to introduce
A new topic by inertia. He, however, was only getting started.
He started another inexplicable sentence, however,
More and more raindrops were colliding with our cluttered
(Do I use that word too often?) minds.
Later though, I never noticed that thirteen miles could make
Such a difference with the weather.
III.
And so I thought, after our world had blown up,
I began to think of our world again.
He, now being an indentured servant of sorts, was there, and I
Being of troubled mind, went to see him.
“I’ll be there soon!” He said (For, in some circles, he was He).
So here, in this insane asylum I sat thinking:
“Gering sind sie der Rede nicht wert;
Noch fügen des Leibes Glieder sich fest.“4
(Oh, Die Wälkure was so wonderful!)
Not though, to be compared with the master created by
Mozart’s finest student as well as Schuller did5.
(Oh yes, it’s Alla Marcia of the fourth of the Ninth!)
Perhaps God resided within Mozart’s student’s mind.
But now life (or is “Life” better?)
Meant more to me.
Life (as it happened)
Meant more to me than the gentle blue streaks in the sky at night.
(Fortissimo!)
Or the palaces that were in Asia6.
No, nothing meant more to me than life (or is “Life” more proper?)
Life, strewn about here and there. Pieces of my heart in the minds
Of the evil women that I’ve given myself to.
(Did I say “given myself to”?)
I do believe it prudent to retrieve them back so then,
With tears in my eyes,
I could present them back to Life again7.
– September 1990
NOTES
1. “Evelyn” – a reference to my sweet (now deceased) friend, Evelyn Kouloumberis.
2. “businessmen…” and “…British Army…” – allusions to Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut album.
3. “sixty miles east” – allusion to Athens, GA and more specifically, R.E.M.
4. “Gering sind sie…” – from Richard Wagner’s Die Wälkure: “They are minor\Not worth talking about\My body is still in one piece.”
5. “Mozart’s finest student…” – Beethoven.
6. “Or the palaces…” – dual allusion, in one part to the Book of Revelation in another to Coleridge’s “Xanadu”.
7. “back to life…” – allusion to Dickens’s A Tale Of Two Cities.