Lately, my favorite pastime has been physical decluttering, which paradoxically seems to create more mental clutter. I sift through boxes with a ruthless, unsentimental focus, discarding roughly 70% of what I unearth. It’s a journey into the artifacts of a former self: stacks of papers covered in scribbled longhand, a relic from when pen and paper were my medium of choice.
Inside these boxes are fragments of unfinished stories, the starts of two chick-lit novels that never found their endings, drafts of essays and letters, rogue journal entries, to-do lists, book and song quotes, and a rather embarrassing collection of bad poetry.
Bad poetry so exquisitely terrible that it deserves one last hurrah here before being unceremoniously recycled. Ironically, if I’d tried to write poetry this bad on purpose, it wouldn’t hold a candle to the earnestness captured in these verses. Cringe-worthy sincerity is the hallmark of truly bad poetry, and these pieces from nearly a decade ago wear it proudly. Today, I own them without shame!
“Beth”
Matured intensity of a city dweller.
Urban foraging, empty aspiration.
Indulge her and taste the city:
Concrete and butts, tucked
under your tongue like a pill.
“The Pleasure of Bread”
Suppose I talk about the pleasure of bread:
The mutual love when mouth and food are wed,
The smell and taste of giving life,
the grainy flesh yields to a knife.
Have you had the pleasure of my bread?
“(Un)titled”
In the morning it’s instant coffee and hard-boiled eggs.
His index finger rubs salt over the yielding whites,
and he watches me eat and sip. He looks here and there
For things that may not be there.
We know to go East, to ignore the ripe fruits, and
To hide our faces when the birds call.
Walking through the hallowed corridors:
We’re looking for the kind of comfort
that only comes after extreme discomfort.
Our sanity long since plucked, our
eyes blink away dirt and tears, searching
for a place to repose.
