(note this poem is unedited in total because I have to return paint to JoAnn Fabrics: oh the exciting life)
King Arthur's DNA (or a history of things I've written)
My first attempts at poetry were heroic
Rebellion.
Against my inability to meet girls,
my few friends,
my somewhat isolating view on the world,
My optimism that one day,
I could be a superhero,
Like Spiderman,
or Luke Skywalker.
The refrains of those poems
often still ring in my head,
like Hootie and the Blowfish songs
or English class darling Robert Frost.
Poetry that justified my inability
to crack the starting line up in football,
and used my love of Jesus as shield
for my fear to try new things,
G-rated poetry as
middle school
high school rebellion.
Then it changed,
I grew up,
Read Chaucer,
Le Morte De Arthur,
Shakespeare.
Clearly my mature tastes
led to better words,
a wider vocabulary,
less AABB rhyme schemes,
and more grand ideas
and chivalrous descriptions,
that gave me slightly more luck
with women,
and sounded slightly less
like I ripped off a Matchbox 20 song.
Then the knights in shining armor,
magic, and castles fell to ruin.
A renaissance of rebellion.
as I embraced punk rock,
threw of romanticism and religion in one go.
Rhyme schemes and beauty were gone.
Questions came in.
Why government?
Why God?
Why sex?
Why no sex?
Why love?
What’s love?
What the hell am I doing here?
So many questions that I failed to answer
with the darker imagery
minimal rhyming and anger.
This questions were finally answered:
cynicism.
I embraced politics and profanity
sprang from my pen and keyboard.
If I couldn’t tell what was going,
and I couldn’t make it pretty,
it would be pointed.
Sarcastic.
Current,
and (in my mind) funny,
poetry written for the slam,
to bring down the man.
Throughout all this was one constant.
I believed in love (like a bad movie)
and I found it, and got married.
My love became the new target of bad poetry,
as I wrote toasts to mundane things,
a habit I thought I’d broken in middle school,
after I spent days writing about Diet Dr. Pepper.
Here I am not, probably fifteen years or more,
since I first tried to write.
My words soaked in nostalgia for the heroic knighthood,
or the innocence on asking questions and expecting to find answers.
I tend to put more science in now,
with the historic images.
King Arthur’s DNA runs through the bloodstream
of my poetic lineage.
Now peppered with an image of myself that is much
older and beaten than I really am,
an old soul who’s listened to too much Tom Waits,
and read some Bukowski.
and I’ll keep going,
with my current view,
that bicycles and coffee are cool,
that these words only purpose is to keep me going.
and to get the girl (which I did)
and to change the world (which I still say I will)
and to somehow make it past thirty.
(Depends on the Mayans but I’m going to count on it)
