And Other Poems

The word count on my story has not increased any since my last post, so in order to appease your righteous indignation, I offer this explanation:

I have been writing poetry.

When I enrolled in the course titled Studies in Poetry, I believed I would be submerged in the mechanics of poetry, able to appreciate great works of the past in new ways.

That has certainly been achieved, but quite a bit more on top of that has happened as well.

The group of people I took the class with are some of the most talented I've ever met, and as we plodded through the course, it became obvious that writing copious amounts of poetry was helping us understand and appreciate things better. So that is what we did. On the last week of class, our benevolent professor collected three poems from each of us and bound them in a book titled The Darkness Consumes All Light And Other Poems. Credit goes to my friend Caleb for the title. It bears the same name as one of his poems in our small anthology.

You won't find it in stores. I think we may be the only ones who own copies, and I'm proud to have a piece of this semester to keep.

Next semester I'll be in the 4000 level Poetry Writing class. There are four main poems assigned throughout the semester to be beaten and prodded and edited and revised and tortured numerous times through workshops. I'm sure there will be other small assignments, so I'll try to post those. For now, I'll try to keep up with my blog until the spring semester begins.

So now as part of my penance, please accept this poem. It isn't one I composed for the class. I'm sure I'll post plenty of those later.

Hate That

I’ve been moping around today
with some sick sense of anticipation
and trying to place exactly what it feels like.
A little like the thrill of the chill when
the air is cool enough to frost the windows
on my Volkswagen.
A little like opening a parcel from a relative
who doesn’t know how to buy presents.
Then it hit me.
This is the feeling that comes right when someone stops
in the middle of their sentence.
That hanging dread and gnawing agony.
Don’t you just—