Friday, September 30, 2011

Megatherium and Anniversary Thoughts

Well, today marks a year since I started this blog and, as with most anniversaries, I have mixed feelings about it. What have I achieved? What purpose does it serve?

I do not consider myself a great writer and I am pretty lazy with forms. I mainly write to entertain myself and to extract ideas from my head in a slightly more elegant manner than "You know, like, it's so crazy, like, when you have a dream that's like, surreal, and you're like, on the moon and then, I dunno, you're like going crazy and..." Because that's how plenty of these ideas begin. I suppose it helps me understand some of my own thoughts and explore points of view that are different from my own. So, yes, I am achieving something by writing these poems. But am I achieving anything by sharing them? Let's explore this.

I have always felt a strong hesitation to share art of any kind, but poetry especially, and I believe it stems from a fear of being misunderstood. I hate it. I try to understand people and I want people to understand me, but, of course, being misunderstood is inevitable. I vacillate between honestly not giving a shit what people think about me and desiring to uphold an unattainable, perfect, lovable image. The result is a lot of "Hey, looky what I can do!" followed by "Oh, maybe I should have kept that to myself." It's as if there are two opposing voices inside my head: One is a rambunctious child who knows no boundaries and is eager to share anything and everything with the world and the other is a strict parent that tells the child to shut up and stop embarrassing everyone. If I had to side with one or the other, it would have to be the child. But, thanks to socialization, the parent's voice is still there and is not going away. My only choice is not to obey it.

Back to the question: Am I achieving anything by sharing these poems? I have heard often that if something makes you fearful, going toward it can help you overcome it. Putting these words out there for the world to see is certainly frightening but hey, a year has gone by and the world has not come crashing down yet. I just don't see the point in writing these things and keeping them a secret to take to the grave. I think that gives them weight they don't deserve. They are just words.  I conclude, therefore, that this blog is helping me slowly overcome my paralyzing fear of being seen as a sick, twisted, horrible, demented, disgusting person incapable of being loved or understood by anyone but Satan.

Now here's a poem about an extinct mammal.

Megatherium
Was the sky blue
The day you died
With a roar and tumble down?
Off your tail,
not teetering, no,
but hoisted high above the trees;
No enemy known
And no fear inside
You raked in your rightful bounty
Lush and untainted
By the greed of my kind,
Slow as a six-ton sunrise.
Slothful giant,
Did you die in vain
Ten brief millennia ago
To end up now
Museum entombed
Quiet, immobile, vulnerable
Much like before
When bushes whispered
And made unexpected enemies?
Planet earth
Could not contain you
And evolution was unkind.
Ambushed by spears
And the cruelty of time,
Only bones you left behind.