I ate a poem

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I used to write bad poems. Freshly heartbroken and only 18, my poems were especially bad. Thankfully, most never saw the light of day. They were relegated to my long-since abandoned Tumblr — an echo chamber of darkness.

And yet, one of them did. I wrote it in a fit of melodrama during the winter of my freshman year and somehow it ended up in a zine that me and three other people made for our final project in an American literature class. I don’t recall the theme of the zine but I can guarantee you the connection between it and this poem was tenuous at best.

I wish it stopped there. We each had to present a piece of the zine to the class, and I chose to do a reading of this poem. Standing in front of the class, I got about 3 or 4 lines deep into this multi-page monstrosity before I realized what I was doing. The shame I should’ve had the whole time finally kicked in and yet I had no other choice but to finish what I had started. In front of 80 other students, I read my poem about me trying to find empowerment after a bad relationship, as told through a metaphor about climbing out my ex’s bedroom window. Just thinking about it now I feel sick.

Naturally I tried to forget about that poem, and aside from the occasional crippling flash of memory, I did. Until recently, when I actually sought it out.

Depression has gotten the best of me lately. I have to save my energy just  to get through the day. My creative faculties are being directed mostly at activities for my EFL students, and while I feel the urge to make poems it’s no match for fatigue.

One of the best (and only?) ways for me to get around this, even if just for a moment, is to eat my old work. I take something I made a while back (long enough ago to fully hate it now), chew it up, digest it, and see what substance is really there. I would normally call this “composting” (hi, Chris, if you’re reading this) but actually it’s more like eating in this case because I’m fucking starving and all I have is this stale poem to feed me. Gotta trim off the moldy pieces and salvage what I can.

Anyway, I took this embarrassing poem and ate it. I got a short, sweet little arrangement out of it. I haven’t actually done the math but I’d say this is, at most, 1/30 the length of the original.

So I like it. Despite the source material being 7 years old and having virtually no relevance to my current place in life, this new iteration is so perfectly now.

Read it and tell me what you see. Who is there? Are you the naked stranger? Am I the you in the glass? Let me know. I’m craving a workshop.

And please, give it a title. I never can.

 

 

Who’s there? A

naked stranger calling

out. Come touch

the you in glass—

 

linger on this

scene. Loud

and all at once,

defunct

Po-vember ends

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This little project of mine has officially come to a close with poem #30. Although I fell behind often, and so I definitely did not write “one poem a day” like I had planned, I still wrote 30 poems mostly within the month of November. In other words, I did it. And I feel good about that!

Over the last year or so, I really wasn’t writing any poems. I had a few in the works, which are still collecting virtual dust in unopened, untitled Word documents on a flash drive, but my lack of writing had gotten to the point where I felt uncomfortable calling myself a poet. The title felt undeserved. What is a writer who doesn’t write?

I’m glad I felt some urge to start writing again — or, rather, an urge to force myself to start writing again. To force myself to write a poem every day was admittedly a little too ambitious, given how long it had been since I finished any poems at all, but true to character. This all-or-nothing impulse is also what led me to move to Korea before I had ever even moved out of my home state.

Each of the 30 poems I wrote for the month of November is rough. There are maybe one or two I think are complete, or close to it, but the others are absolutely not. Maybe it’s irresponsible to post ~30 drafts before receiving any feedback on them, but vulnerability was a large part of this project. Sharing any creative work with anyone is a terrifying (and exhilarating) experience, whether it happens in a writing workshop at a university or on a blog that anyone can read, if they want to.

Part of why I didn’t write for so long was because I didn’t want to be vulnerable. I was preparing myself first to move away from the city I had lived in for years, where all of my friends were, then preparing for the big move abroad, and then suddenly I was here, in Korea, trying my hardest not to be homesick or experience culture shock and denying those feelings whenever they came along. And eventually it ate away at me and ended with tears and an existential crisis in late October. What am I doing here? Why did I come here instead of going to graduate school? Why was this the right decision, and what am I learning from it?

I suppose it’s no coincidence that Po-vember was born shortly after this. While I’m on this birth metaphor, can I point out that November marks 9 months of living in Korea? Just saying.

What’s next for all these Po-vember poems? I’m not sure. I have thought about making a chapbook, though it would probably have to be virtual since my access to a printer is limited to work. Some revision is necessary beforehand, though — of my own and of any other kind souls willing to be another pair of eyes. If I just described you, contact me in whatever way you wish, even if you only want to offer feedback on one stanza or one line or one em dash that’s driving you absolutely wild the way it’s positioned right now.

Before I end this, I want to thank everyone who read any of the Po-vember poems. It’s silly, but getting notifications that people were liking each post really encouraged me to keep going even after I fell behind. A reader, singular or plural, is as much a part of my poem as the time I spend making it, so thank you.

I hope you’ll be back again for the next one(s).

The featured image is the sunrise in Busan as seen from my apartment, taken on November 16.

Po-vember, 30

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WORRY

 

To remind you of this

train wreck, to publicly

mourn

 

                  between it’s jaws as

                  it lunged at my throat. He

 

can feel the presence

of dragonflies—

 

even smaller,

more innocent today.

Po-vember, 29

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HELLO FROM YOUR FRIEND

 

Opponents

attack despite warning

signs. We aren’t

 

scared of you, not

interested in cold

war,

 

to stir controversy on

the surface of

Mars, en route to

pleasant conversation.

 

There was mutual

expectation it would

 

continue in some way. I

wish I too was

so young.