bwiley16

Hello world of SG, hope all are well this afternoon. I was living in the past again, going through odd old ends unearthed in the process of moving. I used to write a lot...used to view the world as a much larger and optimistic place than I do now, comes with age maybe? I took and English Lit class in college one summer that was focused on poetry. It was taught by a prof I had taken classes with before and talked with at length about my writing and the works of others. I really wanted to be a poet, though I was never really able to sort out who exactly pays poets. My favorite phrase at the time was, "never lose your sense of wonder." Somewhere along the way mine has become harder to find. Maybe that is a byproduct of some form of success, expectations tend to be lifted when things work.

I was horribly unlucky in love in college, possibly because of my desire to have inappropriate relationships: married women, single mothers, even the previously mentioned professor were targets of my affections. The professor I think was intrigued by me, but not romantically. The lit class I took required us to write some and she would pull examples of the style we were focused on from the students' submissions and distribute them to the class. Mine were normally towards the front, which I interpreted to mean I was either fantastically talented or she was just incredibly intrigued, either outcome seemed positive to me. Ultimately I was somewhat thematically challenged as most of my writing focused on drinking or other indulgence or love or the lack thereof. Not the broadest subset of topics to write about and one can only take so much early-twenties related angst, probably why I have not yet won a Nobel prize for literature.

Anyways, here's another poetic (maybe, maybe not, you decide) little ditty...

Taking off my shirt
to reveal the sunken ribs,
a body ravaged by circumstance,
she can't help but
reach out, feeling
the emaciation,
testing its reality
our reality
and remembering it from before
quickly removed though
as if forgetting her place,
no touching now
some things have changed
though I welcomed it
for that moment
her uninhibited concern mixed with
despair
at what we've become.