Poetry for All

Hello, everybody! I missed class on Monday, so I don't have a class reflection. I do, however, have a few poems that I've been working on. I write in free verse. I just seem to struggle so much with finding creativity in the constraints of closed form.

I can't think of a good name for this first poem...so if you have any ideas...throw them down!

Ophelia of LA by Alicia Rogers

The world is still, a breath caught within the lungs,

soft lungs that collapse into shades of blue and grey.

I can smell the pain. It’s waiting

just beyond the borders of who I am, who I was,

who I am yet to be.

Ophelia. driven to madness in Lake Los Angeles.

But the world isn’t still. It shifts and moves.

It bobs and weaves faster than my hands can reach out and take hold.

And I don’t want to take hold.

Let’s run free

from these conventions, from these expectations, from the bullshit lines that draw our circumstances.

It’s happenstance created by indecision

and revision.

We insist, we chant, we scream “I’m so deep. Look at me, I’m so deep.”

But we aren’t.

This is universal: the overwhelming force of drowning in my own insistence.

The flowers in the lake, the welcome darkness of the water—

ink to blot out what I know too well.

I breathe the water and it breathes me,

dragging me under.

A year from now I’ll know that this was real,

that I was born from the coughing

choking

gagging

screaming

that brought me down to death

Carpe diem.

I’ll seize that day and fall back

to the earth that birthed me into its stillness of grey and black.


And here's the second poem:

After by Alicia Rogers

You promised me shooting stars

that we’d catch on our tongues

as we wove our bodies together.

I promised you the sea, the ground, the foundation.

I gave you permanence.

You gave me flight.

But flying is transitory, and I fell

down

in a different land.

A strange land.

A broken land.

lost