Oh, to be a Poet!

Drama lends itself to music. And music to drama. Which is why I used to write such fantastic songs. And, also, alas, why can't seem to write much of consequence anymore. When your heart and emotions are yanked this way and that, it sets perfectly to music, where it can reach right into your core and twist and turn in melodic reverie. But the subtle, the sublime, the quietly profound - these things are for poetry. These things set on a page in metaphor and silently enter the mind and heart of the reader, resulting, at best, in a whispered sigh of understanding and reverence. Not dancing. That's for music. And drama.

But my life now, and my struggles, and my realizations, my hopes, my heart's most fervent reachings, nowadays, are subtle, sublime, and quietly profound. And a poet, I am not.

I used to fancy myself a poet. When I was in the 4th grade. I even wrote a book of poetry and submitted it to a contest. I won. I was sent to the regional competition, and won again. I think I got a certificate with my name on it in calligraphy and a golden seal. And a coupon to the local bookstore for anything I wanted. Oh, I knew then that I was a poet for sure! When the famous author, Ivy Ruckman, came to our school... you know, Ivy Ruckman? Who wrote The Night of the Twisters? What, you've never heard of it? hm. how strange ["published" and "famous" are synonymous in the mind of a 4th grader]... anyway, when the famous author, Ivy Ruckman, came to our school for an assembly, I got to talk to her, and she signed my book, and also a little blank book for writing in, which subsequently became too precious to write in, as it was signed by a famous author and I didn't want to profane its pages with such amateur writings as my experiments. I wanted to save it for when I wrote really good stuff. Then I would write it in there. I would save it for something special.

I still have it. Still blank, but for Ivy Ruckman's autograph, wishing me good luck in my future writing career. Perhaps this was the beginning of the end. I don't think I attempted to make any of my writings public after that. I kept trying to write something really good first. In the 5th grade we started writing "essays," and I was good at those, and forgot about the juvenile poetry I'd loved so much.

By high school, I had started to write poetry again. I was, after all, a die-hard fan of The Cure, and I was moody and melancholy and tormented and fifteen. What better time to lament the bitterness of life? But I don't think my childhood talent carried over into adult-ish writing. In the 4th grade the pinnacle of my aspirations looked something like Shel Silverstein. I was good at rhyming, at silly puns, at frivolity in words. Trying to write like Robert Smith was another thing altogether, and so I never showed my poems to anyone I respected.

Soon, I got into songwriting. It was perfect for me. I was, in fact, better at writing music than the lyrics that went with it, but was a decent lyric writer nonetheless. Lyric writing is, after all, really the perfect balance between Shel Silverstein and Robert Smith. You have to rhyme, you have to express complex concepts in words that fit just so, but you have to be serious too. You have to have real pain and anguish behind what you're saying.

Lyrics would never play out without the music. It pains me to look at my lyrics instead of listen to them. It's not poetry (and don't get me wrong, poetry doesn't play well with music, in my opinion. It's painful to listen to songs that were written on the page before in the head. Just my 2 cents). Poetry is its own beast. Its own talent.

But I wish I could write it now. I wish there were a way to beautifully and artistically express my inner life, the things I'm learning, the things I yearn for, the things I think about, the things I love.

My life has become a poem, not a song. And in some ways, it's trapped, with no way to get out.