love beau/ in another hour it will be 6am

  Posted on September 30, 2014 at 6:30 am

The title reminds me why the poem is written the way it is.  The late night rambling of a college student trying to make sense of what he has no experience with.  The desire of a confused child to make everything us v. them, me vs. others, black vs. white.  It’s difficult for me not to judge my old poems.  To not judge the kid who wrote them.  I have to fight feeling a certain stupidity reciting the lines out loud.  I am floored by how specific I believed that I was and how that specificity is kind of shallow and myopic. These poems where I am criticizing everyone else are quite revealing as to how invisible I thought I was.  Especially to all the women I wanted to love me.  And in my memory, there were many women invisible to me. But that wasn’t the narrative of my life in most of these love poems. It’s not the energy in them. There is a connection in my voice having to honor each time I have lived in the recitation. I am struggling with allowing that process to be full. I am resisting the strain that lived in my voice when fear controlled so much of my thinking and choosing. Did it? Am I being too hard on myself? I can hear the scared kid in the poem desperately wanting to control. I can feel his words trying to hammer the point to prove to himself as much as everyone else. I want to love this kid. I have a hard time not just dismissing everything of my youth as lame. But there is a power in willing to be perceived as foolish. There is a need to even embrace the times in my life I may have spent years running from.