Monday, March 30, 2015

JACKIE CHOU
Writing Poems

I turn to the next available blank page in my notebook
And stare at it, demanding a brilliant idea or line from it.
The blank page stares back. Selfish blank page,
All take and no give.
What can I do but to dress those bastards with
Beauteous, noble words?
Lines, circles, dots, and curves hang on their
unfitting bodies like priceless jewels on pigs.
Words are so beautiful on their own, unmarred by
reality and the sordid hearts of those bastards.
Yet words can also be empty and insufficient,
Like an evening dress hung on a plastic
headless mannequin.
So I alter my words to fit those fat, crooked bastards.
Then I glower at my creation and complain.
Why them and not truth, my preferred model
who befits words?
Then I realize that the talentless writer is no
better than her subjects.
I open my textbook to see examples of good poems.
Theodore Roethke is Ralph Lauren
and Alfred Lord Tennyson is Calvin Klein.
I am nobody.
I am an amateur writer trying to write poems.

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