Category Archives: Throwback Thursday

From sometime in 1992:

Put down your torch, Cupid.
I do not need to burn with love, your angry love such as you gave Apollo.
Put down your bow, boy.
I do not want your arrows through my heart. I have felt their sting before.
You pierce, you burn, but it is a bitter fire.
It consumes me, this rage. A rage against which I have no defense.
I am no Daphne.

Einstein was my first cat, a gloriously fat and fluffy Maine Coon whom I adored, as you can see from that marvelous 1989 senior pic over there on the side. Yes, I loved that hat. And that hair. And that sweater.

My guess is this was an assignment for senior English in high school, to write a poem in the style of somebody else. Enjoy.

My Einstein (patterned after ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe)

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a pile of chemistry problems that were quite a bore-
While I struggled, pencil gnawing, suddenly there came a clawing,
As if something gently pawing, pawing at my bedroom door-
“‘Tis my silly cat,” I muttered, “clawing at my bedroom door-
Out of food and he wants more.”

Open here I flung the door wide, when, with hunger a force at his side,
In there strode my giant Einstein weighing 15 pounds or more.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord of jungle, turned and walked to the bathroom door-
Perched upon the bathroom scale then just inside the bathroom door-
Meowed and whined and licked the floor.

Then this innocent cat beguiling my distraught face into smiling,
By the cute and irresistible little face he wore,
“Though you think you’re far from fat, you cat,” I said, “no more, and that’s that!
Silly, warm, and cuddly cat wandering through the house’s floors-
Tell me why you think you should get what’s behind that cupboard door!”
“Hungry!” meowed he, “I want more!”

But my Einstein still beguiling my mad fancy into smiling,
Straight I sat on toilet seat in front of cat and bowl on floor;
Then, within the cupboard seeking, for something to feed my sweeting,
Found, the sack most empty, thinking why this devious cat on the floor-
Why he meowed while I was working for he already knew before;
“You ate it all, THERE IS NO MORE!”

Last week I offered up a cheesy poem – why not add more ooey goodness? Yes, I actually still like this one, even though it’s obvious I was working with rhythm in my attempts to construct it. What do you think? (I’m starting to feel I ought to apologize to Maya Angelou, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the many other extraordinarily talented poets out there…)

sometimes…

sometimes i sit and wonder as my mind begins to wander
over the paths that i have chosen in my life.
if i’d turned a little sooner or maybe you a little later
the change that could have wrought is much to ponder…

the decisions and the choices that have been told through many voices
and have wrought so many changes in myself
perhaps are better hidden than to run through me unbidden
bringing questions into which i will not delve.

the way that i appear when i look into the mirror
is not the one i feel i am inside
i cannot help but wonder what will cure this aching hunger
to fight myself and not flow with the tide.

maybe it is better not to pull myself together
but to look inside each individual part.
then i can finally learn what it is that makes me burn
to live, to learn, to love with all my heart.

Yes, I wrote poetry. Lots of it. Much of it horribly overwrought with painfully bad turns of phrase and excesses of emotion. Whatever. Some of it I still like – and frankly if I were to write poetry today it’d probably end up much the same. I remain fond of this one, purple prose and all. I think it’s from the early 1990s.

silence

the voice of silence hanging in the air
does break the quiet of the early morn
mute beauty bursting forth is not so rare
when sun and earth together are reborn

the simplest song so softly can be heard
it beckons with a haunting melody
the crickets join together with the bird
and mountains come together with the sea

the peaceful solitude that can be found
within the misty dew before the dawn
is mystically free of any sound
and hovers in the air when morning’s gone

as night and shadow slowly fade away
tranquility envelops early day

This little bit of writing may pre-date Chandler Bing by a few years, but could it BE anymore dramatic (especially my Use of Capital Letters)? What can I say – I’ve always been, erm, highly in touch with my emotions.

I drafted this while away at college for the first time. I spent my freshman year at Ripon College in Wisconsin, eight hours away from my home. As I struggled with some of the adjustments we all face moving from teenage-hood to adulthood, I started walking around the streets of Ripon to clear my head. This, apparently, was one day’s result:

A Winter’s Walk

I went soul-searching today, and found what I had lost. Unto the world I may be trivial, but that makes my problems mere trivialities. I may have no impact on the world but the world has an impact on me, and that is why I’m alive. That is why I LIVE.

Walking across endless fields of decaying corn standing withered but facing the wind proudly, I breathe in the scent of nature. The finger cracks in the black of the street reach out, beckon, lure…The glory of the magnificent sky blue overhead with streaks of white weaving across it in asymmetrical symmetry draws my eyes upward.

A tiny plane floats above, breaking the purity of the heights, and I wonder with quiet apathy where it is flying and who is on it and what kind of lives do they live? My eyes drift downward and my mind falls on a house. It is a box, an enclosing, encroaching structure, but in its own way beauty, too, for behind the window lurks a heart. The houses come alive, begging me to admire them in their cold facades. But here a flower drawn by childish hands hangs in the window and the paint on the pane is chipping off. The houses are not perfect either in their detached loneliness.

The street fingers lead me on, my closed mind opening up to the signs of life around me, and what life there is! How Wonderful it is to be Alive Today! Hand in hand with the icicle stream, the barren trees twisting their mystical lore around me I walk on and silent nature speaks through the rustling of the rushes, the distant chuckling of the winter water, the whistling of the boughs over me. I breathe in air, new air, filling me with inner peace, serenity, insight into myself. Today I went soul-searching and Found what I had Lost.