Juvenilia

[Ancient History]

So I was looking through my stuff, and I found an old high school literary magazine I'd gotten some crappy poetry written in. I thought I could share, comment, and y'all could do the same with you and yours.

Towers of stone,
Towers of glass,
Built from bones
Of the great human morass.

The buttresses leap,
The girders bend,
Wood seems to sleep,
Plaster and cardboard are the latest trends.
Columns of marble,
Columns of steel,
You cannot hear birds warble
In walls where paint peels.

Covered by plastic,
Covered by chrome,
Thoughts are sarcastic,
The legacy of Rome.

Towers of stone,
Towers of glass,
Can you condone
What is being done by the Mass?

As should be obvious, I was really stuck on "Poetry should rhyme, dammit!"
This was shortly after I first read Neuromancer, and it shows (the title is taken directly from the book). I find it interesting that I had a weird psuedo-philisophical/religious cynicism in the last two lines of the last two stanzas.

Striding through the drifting snow,
Many, many ages ago,
A hunter of creatures
With saber-toothed features,
A gatherer of roots, not wearing any boots!
Changing slowly over time,
Making his songs and forming his rhumes
Be the enemy mammoth,
Be the prey small,
He can, no doubt, take them all.
He is behemoth,
Striding the earth,
His name is Man,
Let all give hime girth.

Very weak, yaar. I distinctly remember doodling this up in the school library after reading an old National Geographic, the usual pasttime when I was screwing off for extended periods in English and Social Studies classes.

It's days like this,
I reminisce
About times long ago
And days aglow.

An amigo's face is shown to me,
Silhouetted in knots on a nearby tree.

Friends past float in my eyes grown wide,
Through the mists that swirl around outside.

The sun does not rain on this parade,
My little ghostly promenade.

Of things I've done and athings I've not.
Of people I've met and people I've sought.

But as the clouds grow dark and grim,
So do my memories begin to dim.

I clutch to a precious few old tales
Of running and of country dales.

My sight returns to pleasenter things,
The present Now with all the gifts it brings.

Hidden outcomes,
New-found chums,
Songs waiting to be sung.
Let the days of mist stay on the bottom rung
As I climb to the future far outflung.

Probably the best of the lot, I did this at about 6AM on a lonely, gray foggy morning at school. Some of y'all may not know, but I've moved a lot...about once every year and a half on average for the past 20 years. I went to a different school for every grade level from 1st grade up through my sophmore year in High School. So picking up friends was a little...odd for me. I was always a bit of an outsider, a bit weird. The kids who'd been in the same town for their whole lives and had the same friends for years and years were completely alien to me.

I have no idea why I ended this on an optimistic not. I suspect it's because I like grey days, and they contrast well with the bleeding soil of Georgia.

Bundles of wires,
Miles of nerves,
Electron sires,
Their masters do serve.

Tubes of metal,
Cubes of plastic,
No one will now settle
For less than the fantastic.

Light flows
Through the eyes and lenses,
The same, one knows,
Flow through fibers to senses.

Carbon and silicon,
Two sides of a coin,
Which masters the electron,
And which purloins?

Can silicon sing?
Can silicon cry?
Orpheus' echoes ring,
So long as no one out there tries.

Silicon is a medium,
Carbon is too,
But put them together,
And Orpheus will sing anew.

Another "I'm a teenager who just read Neuromancer for the first time." The sad thing is, I swear I was the only in the entire damn school who had ever read that book. Ever. The Orpheus reference/myth is a little confused, and the silicon/carbon debate is a bit muddled (carbon is life, silicon is computers; Orpheus as the herald of rebirth when two dead things, people and computers, are brought together and create something new...yeah, I was insane back then, too.)

[Kai]

Hey, better than my junior high poetry notebook (we had this whole project thing going on). The best of them I can laugh myself sick over, the worst makes me wonder how anyone can stand to grade poetry from 7th graders and pretend its good.