From Under the Tree: How The Present Really Got There (And Why We Should Send Them Back)

There’s a controversial Christmas song that I just love: Lady Gaga’s Christmas Tree. Full of rabid innuendo and a pop/rock beat, I just can’t get enough of it. It’s also a stark contrast to the radio hits they must forget as soon as the songs roll over (for why else would they play them three and four times an hour, when such amazing new music has been crafted, such as Enya’s “And Winter Came…” or the Hotel Cafe Presents Winter Songs?), and as a vehement oppositionist of Christmas (remember last year?), I appreciate the change in tunes.

In any case, it’s pretty obvious what I must be thankful for today, isn’t it? Grudgingly or not, today I’m thankful for giving.

“Editorials” and Other Poems

Last week my creative writing class moved from screenwriting to poetry–and now I’m rolling in the poems and have finally amassed a number of reasonably good enough ones to share here! I’m quite incredibly excited by this, I’ve felt these pages have been rather empty of art lately, and I’ve been eager to add something here for a while.

Today I also completed my screenplay–a forbidden romance with a philosophical slant entitled “Sinners and Sine Waves”–and after I’ve edited it sufficiently, I’ll begin posting it serially for a few weeks. But in the mean time, please enjoy some word-wrought poetry!

Alphabet Soup

Once upon a time I began using this website called Plinky that gives you daily writing prompts. Longtime readers might even recall some of my Plinky posts; they always had a little lightbulb at the bottom, indicative of the fact that I had posted them through Plinky.

In any case, one of the prompts I didn’t find very lengthy, so I never posted it here: The challenge was to write a piece of poetry using only words that began with the letter S. It was a fun exercise. I enjoyed it.

The idea, however, never left me, and I decided someday I would write a slew of new poems, each of them directed by a single letter only. (I suspect X, Z, and Q will be challenging.) I’ve written a few more of these, and now that’s I’ve got a small number of poems amassed, I figured I’d share them here–and I encourage you to do the same!

Some day I’ll have all twenty-six poems written. Perhaps you’ll beat me there? Either way, I hope you enjoy these.

The Antithesis of Fear

The illusion of fear cannot be broken because fear is not an illusion. In fact, I feel, fear is the one true emotion that we can all experience without delusion. Science, I read once, has suggested that depressed people have a clearer, more realistic view of the world we live in; that happiness itself is not merely an emotion, but a mask, a lens that obscures the truth existing around us and lets us soften the corners of these sharp edges in our minds.

When we feel an absence of fear, it is only the alleviation of that fear that we are experiencing. When we feel fearless, we have not known bravery or courage, but have not yet seen a reason to challenge ourselves, to cause that fear plagued upon us each differently to rear its head and demand our attention.

But perhaps there is an antithesis to all of this. Perhaps fear, as the other end of an extreme spectrum, is not itself the only true emotion, but the only one within which our human minds can identify.

I is for It Gets Better

Back while I still pondering over what H is for, I felt I was for Invincible. I said to myself, being open, being confident, being who you are, makes you invincible, makes you impervious, makes you incredible. I felt of sharing: When I’m afraid, when I don’t think I can go on, I surround myself with positive things–with thoughts of my friends, thoughts of the great people in whose presence I stand, of the glory of God imbuing everything there is with his light and his love, and then I feel invincible and I can go on.

Last week, I began to wonder if I really is for invincible. Instead, I began to think I is for Individual. I felt of sharing: There is no greater bliss than of knowing who you are, all your faults, all your foibles, all your fortes. To understand what goes on inside is to make you impenetrable, insightful, indivisible. To feel, nay, to know what is hidden beneath your exterior, that part of us that we so often wrongly equate the entirely of “I”, is to open doors and possibilities and events that otherwise would remain lost forever. To be an Individual is perhaps among the greatest gift God has ever given us.

Today, although both of these statements stand true and always will–I am Invincible, I am Individual–I know that they are not all I is worth. I is worth a wealth of ideas, a well of inspiration, a river of incentive. I spoke the other night with a wonderful man, a man of whose nature and build I did not think even God could have crafted, and it made realize, in that strange way that unrelated events inspire worlds of difference, in the way that butterflies in Africa incite hurricanes in America, that I is well worth so much more than all of this.

In the Pen, Dance

There’s a certain sense of liberation that comes with the end of a relationship. It’s an odd feeling, since one would imagine there’d be no such sense after a break-up, but those who would imagine this are perhaps exceptions, or else have not had such a relationship before. I am not here to judge. Only to observe.

For all intents and purposes, my last relationship was perfect. He was everything I could want in a man, and he said I was equally as much as he could ask for. Even with nearly five thousand miles between us, we made it an impressive six months before things came to a halting end. That’s still about a hundred and eighty days longer than any of my in-person relationships have lasted. So where’s the irony in that?

What’s most curious for me is the general lack of sadness I feel. When I broke up with my first boyfriend (of two months, for those asking), I was devastated in my reserved way of feeling emotions. Yet, in all honesty, that was an end I had not foreseen, whereas this was an ending I had made peace with before it had happened.

Again, where’s the irony in that?

For Hearts and Soles

Sometimes we love another. Sometimes we love being alone. Here are a few poems I’ve written over the years that speak from my heart of being in love, and loving being the sole of my own relationships.

There’s Something Inside That’s Stirring

There’s something inside that’s stirring
Gears grinding and whirring
Into this depth of passion I feel
This inversion of everything real
Inside an abyss as deep as dark
Sullen and silent and stark
Past memories and fantasies
Toward a destiny that frees
All this ambition and energy
Pent up somewhere inside me
An echo that crosses fast
Tying together future and past
In a moment of time
Wherein was the crime
That came to fruition
In an imaginary nation
That planted this seed
And coaxed forth this greed
To summon this stirring
Of ancient gears whirring
That keeps me moving here
But leaves my visage unclear
A mirror who’s facing me
Whose reflection I cannot see

There’s always been times in my life where words simply could not capture what I held inside me. I write. It’s my life, my blood. But not all writing is the same. An essay can express a thought. A story can express an idea, a feeling. But what can express something that’s past a thought, that’s more than a feeling?

A Pause for Reflection

I began last year by looking at the last decade. This year I’d like to continue the tradition–but with a somewhat narrower scope. Throughout this last semester’s calculus class, my friends and I would frequently ask for a moment to pause for reflection, to look back at what we’d just done to make sure we understood it properly. Just the same, I’d like to take a few moments over the next couple of days to look back over the past year and see what I did well and also where I could improve.

There’s a saying that goes “two steps forward, three steps back” and usually it implies a success followed by a greater failure that set us back further than we began. A moment ago, as I finished writing that last paragraph, I thought of saying that it’s good to begin something new by taking a look back (which reminded me of the saying aforementioned), and together these two thoughts, so parallel in structure, made me wonder: Is it really worth looking back? Isn’t looking back just the same as taking a step forward, to take two back?

I thought about it a moment longer (the thinking mind is truly a wondrous thing, and often works much faster than we give it credit for), and I decided–like my philosophy of no regret (which I think I tried explaining once but didn’t do it justice)–that even a step back can help us take a step forward. We’re never really back where we began, no matter how many times we find ourselves in the same situation; so long as we learn from where we’ve been, it can only help us get to where we’re going next.

So why not take a look back? If only to remember, it can do us no substantial harm.

To the World I’ll Be

I was going to write a sucky-feeling NaNoMonday yesterday, not because NaNoWriMo sucks, but because I felt rather sucky. Heart broken twice in one weak? Seemed like a new record. Then things actually improved drastically yesterday and I felt sucky no longer. So today I was going to write an honorary NaNoTuesday, but then I realised something amazing.

This is my one hundredth blog post.

I can’t believe I’ve already got ninety-nine under my belt. I had to check at first to make sure none of the drafts I’ve written (which are mostly notes to myself containing websites or stories to read) weren’t included in that number, and they weren’t. So. Yeah. This demands something special.

NaNoWriMo, I love you. But you come every year.

This comes only once.

See, I haven’t had any plans for this…so I reckon I’ll just share a few pieces of poetry that speak a bit about me. It’s of no consequence, really, but for some reason, it seems reasonably fitting. One hundred is a square number, but I am an not a square person. No one is. We all have countless edges, countless faces, countless facets and I know I’m no different. I have a personality for every person I meet, and sometimes I wonder, with how often I wander, if anyone ever gets a chance to see the real me (or even if I recognise him myself).

The point being, for this special occasion, I’ve selected a small number of poems that I’ve written throughout the years that speak to me, some about sexuality, some about nature, some about nothing in particular. So please peruse as you please and enjoy the poetry.

…And since I can never end on just enough: It’s worth mentioning, since I find it interesting, that I keep all my poetry in a file called “My Voice.” Years ago I made all my files match the “My Documents” make-up and made the structure seemingly parallel, but this one holds a special meaning: My Voice. I haven’t always been as vocal as I am now, I haven’t always been as brave as I sometimes can be these days, and trust me, I don’t always know what I’m feeling and how to put it into words. But when nothing else works, I can always resort to poetry to express myself, to be my voice when every other means fails.