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The poem in question: can only be found here! Wowzers!

As I was scanning through my notebook while doing the commentary for A Dream I found this little gem of a poem that I wrote one day in French class. It is not dated, but I am assuming I wrote it sometime during my junior year. I sat next to a girl named Sarah and we sometimes would come up with wacky rhyming French words to amuse ourselves. (She and some others would call me “Cliff” to amuse themselves, and I did not see the humor until much later. Alas.) A few of the small phrases we came up with were “la pêche se dépêche” (“the peach hurries”), “la semaine prochaine” (“next week”), and of course, “le thon est bon” (“tuna is good”).

And now, for your probably-not-reading-French pleasure, I present “Le Thon Est Bon.”

Le thon est bon
Especialement mon thon,
Mais le tien aussi,
Ton thon est si bon.
Son thon n’est pas bon,
Mais mon thon est bon,
Et le tien aussi,
Ton thon est très bon.
Si le thon n’était pas bon,
Ça ne serait pas bon,
Mais ne t’inquiète pas;
Le thon est bon.
Décidément, le thon est bon,
Mais mon thon et ton thon
Sont meilleur
Que son thon.

And now, the loose translation:

Tuna is good
Especially my tuna,
But yours also,
Your tuna is so good.
His tuna is not good,
But my tuna is good,
And yours too,
Your tuna is very good.
If tuna was not good,
That would not be good,
But don’t worry;
Tuna is good.
Decidedly, tuna is good,
But my tuna and your tuna
Are better
Than his tuna.

I told you it was a gem.

The poem in question: A Dream

This is the first of three poems dated July 9, 1996, and it also is the worst, in my estimation, but it is a near toss-up with What If?

This poem is about my English teacher from my junior year of high school, whom I have mentioned a few times before. Rather, it is about her ridiculous approach to and understanding of poetry and the clashes I had with her. It is very stupid. However, it is also very funny, and perhaps that balances things out in the end.

Perhaps not, though.

As I recall, I wrote this poem, or at least worked on it a little bit, while I was at work one day at Wendy’s. Those were the days when Wendy’s sent three or four people outside during lunchtime; one or two to take orders, one to stand at the speaker and call them in, and one to collect money. By the time the you got to the window–which was a short time, then–the food was ready, and you were off on your way again. I worked at Wendy’s for two years, and when I worked day shifts I was one of the outside people the majority of the time. Let me tell you, working the change belt in the winter is no fun task. I don’t know why Wendy’s stopped doing the whole outside order taking thing; it was fun for the employees and it seemed to be a really great way to move everyone through the drive-thru quickly and efficiently. Then again, I think Wendy’s has taken a sharp decline in quality in the last ten years in almost every respect, so I’ll just let it go at that. Just don’t get me started again.

So anyway, there were generally a few minutes here and there when all the orders were taken and you had a little downtime, so I worked a little on my poetry. I seem to remember scratching out the lines on the back of one of the order sheets. (The last I’ll say about Wendy’s for now: I really have fond memories of most of the time that I worked there. This was very probably because my girlfriend worked there too, and we usually got scheduled for the same shifts.)

And now more about the poem. I like the rhyming; I don’t attempt the every-other-line-rhyming very often (a quick scan through my notebook shows only three or four other times). It’s harder than your standard ABCB type rhyme, but when done well it adds a certain something. And no, it is not done especially well here, but I like that I made the attempt, and excepting one line that I shall note later, it’s not absolutely ridiculous.

What makes me laugh about the poem are all the statements that my poetry rocks and how my English teacher would someday

…meet with sad demise,
and taste the soul’s revenge.

Like she would ever care if I became a world famous poet. What would I do, track her down, shove the poems in her face and yell, “See? SEE?!?!?!” Well, actually, I probably would, though now I would do it just to be weird, whereas back then I would have done it because I felt personally insulted about all things linking Miss D to poetry. And if I did track her down, she’d probably just say stupid things about it anyway, so what would be the point. My DREAM, that’s the point!

And seriously,

The soul who was rejected

and

…the soul would be avenged

Seriously, me? Seriously? That really cracks me up.

One thing of interest is that I do find a certain irony now in the lines

For if all understood my writings,
They’d have no meaning unto me.

given the fact that I am now doing commentaries and offering understanding. Also:

She simply can’t them decipher,

is a terrible, terrible reconstruction of a simple line just to make the rhyme. It makes me cringe rather than laugh.

Finally, though hopefully it is obvious, I suppose I should note that “Dream” referred to is that I would become a famous poet and rub Miss D’s stupid ugly nose in it. I must have been really outraged back then. I suppose I would probably have similar feelings today though, if I had to take another class where that whole situation repeated itself. The only thing I can say with certainty is that my wife would surely tire of hearing my whining and complaining.

Post-finally, I just noticed that in the copies of this poem that I have stored on my hard drive the last line of the poem is different. Where on the web site and in my notebook it reads

And taste the soul’s revenge.

the other copies read

And taste the bitter taste
Of the soul’s revenge.

So there’s that.

The poem in question: Cried Out

This is a poem of which I like the idea, and the structure, but looking back at it now reads very awkwardly to me. It was written the same day as Insincerity, as previously noted, and it is about the same relationship with the same girl as described therein.

My, does that paragraph sound stuffy.

The style of this poem is patterned after the Paul Simon song “Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall.” You may note with (not so) much amusement that I take what are most probably too many cues from Mr. Simon, but I cannot overstate what beautiful music and lyrics the man has created over the years. I have had in the back of my head for a while the thought that I may, if I ever finish the commentaries on my own works, offer a few on some of his. If I do, I’ll be sure to include my friend Ben’s take on “Leaves That Are Green,” because it makes me laugh.

The style of the poem is not one that I remember having encountered before “Flowers,” but I have since noticed it in a few other songs, with the Barenaked Ladies’ “War on Drugs” springing most quickly to mind. I like the rhyming pattern quite a bit, and I think it’s tricky too pull off without it sounding too forced. While I don’t think that I succeeded as I would have liked to here, neither do I think that I failed miserably.

As a bit of trivia (though what isn’t, with these commentaries?), I thought that this was the only poem that I had ever submitted to anyone, but a quick search of my name on poetry.com turns up a listing for to whom it may concern, which I think is actually a much better poem than Cried Out, but who am I to judge? Oh, that’s right.

Anyway, I submitted this poem to what is probably the same organization that owns poetry.com and got back one of those letters that says something like, “You have a gift. You are beyond gifted. We’ll be happy to publish your amazing poem in our upcoming anthology, of which you can own one of your very own copies for only an exorbitant amount of money. Did we mention you are so gifted that we have never seen your like, and thus should give us money so that you can see your work in print in an actual book?” I never did order one of those books. I did try to find the anthology I was supposedly published in a few times at the local bookstores, but never came across it.

Perhaps now I will actually take a look at the content of the poem, and elaborate a little bit on it.

In the poem, the man has had a relationship end some time before, and has not had another one since. He thinks about it often, and is trying to size up the reasons for its ending. The conclusion he comes to is that he didn’t have enough emotional attachment to the relationship for it to fully flourish, and the woman left him. The reasons for his lack of attachment are not explicitly given, but are ultimately unimportant; the relationship was destroyed beyond hope of being rebuilt. He is devastated, but won’t allow himself to fully feel the pain, because he fears even that level of emotional commitment. He tortures himself continually and cannot see any way to turn his life into something better, because he refuses to accept that some degree of pain is requisite to bring about a fullness of joy. If you don’t know how to be sad, how can you ever know how to be happy? This is noted in a discourse given in The Book of Mormon in 2 Nephi Chapter 2.

The title, “Cried Out,” is actually true, or was. When this particular girl and I broke up, I was determined that I would not get so emotionally attached to someone or something, so that I wouldn’t ever have to feel so sad I had to cry. I started counting how long I went without crying, and I think it was around sixteen months or so. When I finally did cry about something, it wasn’t because I was sad, but rather because I was on a boat and I was scared. Now laugh it up and let’s move on.

Strangely, this commentary took me quite a bit longer to write than the actual poem. I started it five nights ago, worked on it for a few hours and got stuck, came back to it once or twice over the next few days, and finally I decided that it is as good as it is going to get for now, and added this final paragraph. That is all.

The poem in question: Insincerity

Interestingly, I was about to do the commentary for Cried Out, as it showed up next on the list of poems on the site. However, when I looked in my notebook, Insincerity came first. They were both written the same day, but one had to come first, right? It should be no surprise that the theme is very much the same in both poems.

This is the first of ten or so poems, by my quick count, that are about or make reference to an actual relationship that I had with a girl. I’m sure I’ll note which ones are which in future commentaries.

This particular poem references the relationship I had with the girlfriend I have mentioned in other commentaries (the first, and only high school sweetheart). I wrote this poem some four or five months after our break-up. She was the teacher’s assistant in my English class at the time, and so we had to speak to each other occasionally, but after the school year ended, I didn’t speak to her for about two years until I called her on a whim one day and tried to make at least a small amount of peace with her. We ran into one another from time to time at university, but never redeveloped any lasting friendship or bond.

We only dated for a few months, and I have some very fond memories of her, and a few not so much. I remember the first time we went out–unofficially, because I was not quite yet sixteen; in the LDS church we do not date until we are sixteen–we went to a school play with my friend Ben and her friend Jeni. I remember that I put my arm around her at the play, and I think we kissed sometime later that night. Ben was really, really mad at me, I think because of the whole not-yet-sixteen thing. I’ll have to ask him and see if he remembers. He was so mad that the next day when he wasn’t speaking to me, I got mad and got into a stupid fight with another friend, and ended up being thrown in a garbage can by most of my electronics class. Ben was in that class, too, and sat by and watched. He still liked me enough not to participate, but was mad enough not to try and stop it.

Anyway, this particular girlfriend and I thought we knew it all, and talked sometimes of the time when we would be married (we meant to each other, not just married in general). In other words, we were your typical stupid teen-agers. I also remember assuming future marriage with another girl I dated, which means I am doubly stupid and probably still don’t even realize the full extent of my stupidity.

When we broke up, she was very upset. She thought I liked her friend Jeni more, which probably had some amount of truth to it, though I certainly would never have admitted it at the time. Secretly, I was relieved, though I certainly would never have admitted that at the time, either–at least not directly. Because of other things going on in my life at the time, I felt that I was not good enough to date her, or any other girl, for that matter, and I justified myself in my cruelty to her.

The first stanza of the poem speaks of some of this:

The memory was woven tight in his brain,
Indelible–yet it was hard to sustain.
The unbreakable love broke down bit by bit–
The love to which they’d sworn to commit.
The boy was uplifted, joy placed in his heart;
The girl was hurt deeply when the time came to part.

The use of word “indelible” was inspired by the Paul Simon song “Train in the Distance,” where it is used in the line

The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.

I don’t think I had ever heard the word indelible before hearing that song, and the song itself was relatively new to me. As I recall, it was in the late fall of 1995 when Ben gave me my first Paul Simon album, the compilation “Negotiations and Love Songs,” which phrase is also found in “Train in the Distance.” The word “indelible” made an, pardon me for saying, indelible impression on me and I was looking for an excuse to use it somewhere. I even heavily mimicked the phrase in which I originally heard it used.

The next stanza describes what happened after the break-up, I thought as a result of it.

The boy built a wall ’round himself for protection…
That wall was an insincere nature developed;
He feared to again be sincerely enveloped…
He found it was easier playing the game
Insincerely; he could cast off all blame.

This is absolutely true, but not for the reasons that I suspected it was. I should have recognized, then, the truth in the lines

I think down inside him, he was ashamed,
And deeper down yet, shame kindled a flame.

I learned over the successive years that I was not jaded by the disappointing and untimely end of first love; I was haunted by other demons of which I was painfully aware, but of which I sadly lacked more than casual understanding. Soon enough I began to suspect, and have my suspicions confirmed, that it was, in fact, these other demons that changed me into something that I did not want to be, into something that I still am today, though I hope to a far lesser degree.

The final stanza offered me some hope that I would not always be walled-in, that there was something or someone out there who could tear the wall down and restore me to life-before-girl-related-heartbreak.

When alone he could do and say things that he’d never
Do and say un-alone; those ties had been severed.
He could write down his thoughts in forms such as this,

At the time, and for a long time after that, I felt that poetry was my only real outlet for feelings that I had that I didn’t want anyone else to know about. On the outside, I wanted to act like nothing ever bothered me, but I didn’t want to really let go of the “soft side” that I knew I still had and was secretly embarrassed that I didn’t let show. I addressed that very topic in other poems such as Poetisms just three days later, and Here’s Your Explanation a couple of years after that.

A note on the last line of the poem:

And attempt to traverse that dismal abyss.

It originally read

And recall, for a time, that very first kiss.

One night I was hanging out with my friend Cami, probably somewhere in mid-1998, and we were reading some of my poems. Heaven knows why Cami put up with reading them with me so often, but I am glad she did. Back before there was a grassmonk.net, there was a somewhereIforget.com/stevee where my site resided, back before I knew any semblance of PHP or MySQL, or even any semblance of not-crappy HTML. At some point after the beginning of October of that year, Cami printed off a collection of all the pages that were on my site at the time, which included all of the poems found on the site now up to and including you thought you had it made. That collection is one of the sources I am using in writing these commentaries.

Anyway, we were reading Insincerity and revisionism kicked in all of the sudden. I changed the last line, and Cami told me I was amazing. It meant a lot to me, though I probably said something really stupid back to her, to have someone tell me that I was talented at this poetry thing, and that it could actually matter to someone besides me.

I have probably said entirely too much in this commentary, and will no doubt look back on it in the future and wince at large portions of it. But I’m not done yet! There’s more. I want to talk just a little bit about the writing style.

I have already mentioned the Paul Simon-inspired line. There are two couplets that bother me:

He found it was easier playing the game
Insincerely: he could cast off all blame.

and

When alone he could do and say things that he’d never
Do and say un-alone; those ties had been severed.

The reason they bother me is that the first line in each is cut off at a stopping place that isn’t natural, though the second one sounds fine when read aloud as a normal sentence. The unnatural stopping points don’t bother me when taken by themselves, but as a whole they don’t seem to fit with the rest of the poem, stylistically.

I actually don’t have anything more to say than that, except that I’m now planning a series called “Poetisms Redux,” which will contain updated, though non-authoritative, versions of some of my poems. I have been thinking about it off and on for a while, and have already logged some attempts as seen in the commentary for What Lies In Wait and also All The World’s Attention. Last October I also did as hasty rewrite of Inner Betrayal, which I will publish in its commentary.

As a small preview of what could end up as an “Insincerity Redux”, I offer the following:

The boy had a memory, not oft spoken of;
it pertained to a past, and unbreakable, love.
His memory was woven deep into his brain,
indelibly–yet it brought with it pain.
Unbreakable love broke down bit by bit
and unbreakable love was now hopelessly split.

…

Somewhere inside him he still was sincere,
but did not reveal it when others where near.
He had a side left that he tried to suppress,
afraid what might happen if it was expressed.

And that’s that, folks. Good night.