OK, Nick thinks he’s so cool typing up his notebooks from 1965. Here’s my answer, a poem from 1976, when I was TWELVE! Hold on to your pumpkins, people…
December 4th, 1976
“I am not what I should be”
Thus I think, but quietly.
Voices listen and suppress themselves,
Straining to hear and straining not to strain.
Perhaps they do not strain.
Perhaps I only want them to.
A thought, like a goblinesque Ariel
(but how poetic!)
appears, index finger raised
In determination….
But no —
The radio that is my mind
Has switched to another station.
It is ominous; like church music
And much like me.
Ariel returns —
“I am precocity” he says
“Watch me, watch me be different”
but his half-brother,
diffident Modestly, appears —
“but I am not worthy!”
And their father, Frustration, keeps
me within him.
Ariel pounds within his confines
Swearing at this Caliban father;
He knows this to be deja vu.
Hope is Ariel’s mother
Sorrow is Modesty’s.
I am but a child.
My era, my generation; we are silent.
I am lazy, and a spokesman for
the glories of Yesterday. I am
guilty of a deep and exalted
crime: Nostalgia, another
child of frustration and sorrow.
Is Ariel the embodiment of Now? Is Now
caught within the legendary tree? This tree
was the tree of knowledge that caused Man to
sin against his creator, but the tree of
Yesterday. The tree of knowledge is only one of
its many saplings.
Yesterday goes on for so long.
So long.
O merciful and mysterious maker of many.
Is it you I can blame?
My own branch of yesterday is not very long
but I like it anyway. I like to pretend it’s romantic,
but it’s not rally because I capitalize my Is.
It is colorful though, and not broken in too
many places. It is a very perverse branch.
Ariel is a very perverse creature.
Symbolism and
simple vision sound
alike to me.
I never believe what I write.
God be with you.
