Poem for Silence and An Absent Muse (2008/2009)

[Woe is me. I cannot find the date of this piece. It was sometime last winter, I’m assuming. Looking back, its interesting how certain people can mean the world to you and yet are soon forgotten. Its even funnier when their significance is never known to them. I guess now it’ll never be known. Ooo! Secrets! My favorite… Don’t read to much into my rambling, Nancy Drew. I’m just the mystery maker. It isn’t about solving the puzzle, the real story is how the grueling and sometimes incomplete detective work makes you a better person by the end of the novel… What am I talking about? Whatever, here. Enjoy. -J]

You
Are the reason
Why I daydream best at night
When life is so unkind, I find
Reality is lost in the lack of light
And logic puts up a weaker fight.

You have me shackled to my guitar
And, from the chain, dangles my heart
As if a token, a collectible charm
A trophy kill, my candied arm.

It’s a shame
How we both play these games
With the same goals to obtain
But we won’t play on the same team,

Because are not on the same page.
If we are, we look in different ways.
That’s how it might always stay
But not if I have any say…

Insufficient Canvases (2009)

And, There are some things I can’t say aloud to you
That I can confess to a crowd, I do not
Really understand why I prioritize upside down
Carry on your way or come back, I’ll be ok either way.

I’ve been living every year at a day by day pace
Turning every corner, expecting to see your face on
Every stranger, I’m starting as they pass by
Two years ago, you left sunspots on my eyes.
And they say its time to move on…

But I will not settle for less
I won’t let anyone get in my way.
My cannon’s armed and ready,
the fuse is lit I cannot lower my aim.

Another hour and I’ll force myself off this phone
Wondering would I rather if I had never known
What its like to yearn more then your words can right
But then I could never say “Hey, man, I know just what that’s like”
When they say “I just can’t move on…”

But I will not settle for less
I won’t let anything get in my way.
My cannon’s armed and ready, the fuse is lit
I cannot lower my aim.

A painter that wants the sea,
Recreated on Insufficient canvases
Every stoke is awkward and wrong
Like these words, Like this song
Elocution flaws.

You never taught me how to drive, only how to turn the car on,
So I guess I won’t leave the parameters of this garage.
I’m asleep at the wheel while its running in place
As drive-by day dreams paint smiles on my face
I know they’re not real, but I think they could be someday
Yet I’m finding, finding myself won’t be as easy
As writing poetry, So I sleep…

But that would be settling for less!
That’d be letting myself get in the way.
And my cannon is armed and ready, and the fuse is lit
And I will not let you get away.

And there are some things I won’t say aloud to you
That I just confessed to this crowd I do not
Really understand why I prioritize upside down
Carry on with your life or come back…

The Only Thing I’ve Written THIS Week

(Read Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg. For me, there’s a difference between writing practice and good writing. Good writing is writing after I’ve been inspired, when I think of something. Writing practice is writing to hopefully be inspired. If inspiration never comes, I consider all the pages exercise and the soreness muscles in my hand create an excuse for me to ditch the gym again. See? Everyone wins.
I’ve been writing for about an hour a day all week, but this is the only thing I’ve really thought of. This eight line long symbolic image. Crazy, isn’t it? Border lining a little pathetic, if I do say so myself. -J)

 

Its like walking down the beach
With a metal detector
When you happen to see
In the gorgeous weather

The sun’s light, angled to
Reflect the shine
Of a lost diamond
The Machine would have passed by.

Good at Cutting (2007)

She’s good at cutting
The line on which we’re standing
Just little school children
She shoves and she pushes them

This little miss may have gotten detention
But when nuns took her to the dean, she got her attention

She’s good at cutting
People down with her words
I’ve gotten by unscathed
Pretending I just never heard

Cold insults and phrases she learned from her parents
She later told me she never meant it
And I said

If you ever need anything
I’ll be right where you want me
Its all that I can offer
All I have worth giving

“Thanks for your generosity
But there’s no all purpose cleaner
For my mess of a psyche…”

She’s good at cutting
Class and still some how passing
Some say its cheating
She says its just harassing

Teachers into pity, because she says she ‘has no brilliance’
And yet her grades always compensate her lacking attendance

If you ever need anything
I’ll be right where you want me
Its all that I can offer
All I have worth giving
So, There’s no all purpose cleaner
For the mess made of your psyche
There is only here and now
These two mouths made for smiling!

“Thanks for your pity,
But you don’t really know me.”

I know:
She’s good at cutting
Me off when I tell her
Life won’t always be easy
Dealing with problems as a cutter

She interrupts “What would you know?”
I begin to stutter
And stammer out confessions
Not all of which were true
But I thought maybe you could move on
If you had someone to relate to…

If you ever need anything
I’ll be right where you want me
Its all that I can offer
All I have worth giving

So, There’s no all purpose cleaner
For the mess made of your psyche
There is only you and me
I’m the only one trying.

“Thanks for nothing.”

She’s good at cutting
Her wrists with virtually anything.
She’s inventive like that,
Her destructive expression of creativity.

Pens used to be such simple
Writing utensils
To draw veins, describe veins
Anything else is insane.

She says,
Well I’m no artist nor author.
She’s good at cutting.
Its all she’ll allow herself to be.

The therapeutic tool of self expression
becomes the weapon of more destruction,
Then writes her name to a clip board on a hospital bed.
Later, I ponder at my desk while chewing on its plastic end.

How can a life change
By the power of a pen?

Can it?

Introduction to a Writing Portfolio (2008)

[The cover page to a Writing Portfolio final project a year ago for my high school’s Creative Nonfiction class (tagged as CNF). The object of the class was to fill 80 pages in a ‘writers notebook’ over the course of the semester. The record before me was around 120 pages. By the last day of class, I had 205. I had to force myself to stop. This is the introduction to my best pieces from those 200+, and my explanation in response to the common question “why/how do you write so much?” Ironically, it kind of became a piece of itself, in a way. I don’t know, that’s just how I read it. -J]

Writing is what I do.

It’s what I do when my inner monologue won’t shut up. It’s what I do when I feel like the world has bottomed out and hit rock. It’s what I do when I wish someone else was around to witness this with me. It’s what I do when I fear my fist may involuntarily attempt to enter someone’s brain cavity through the nose canal. So, I pry the pen into that fist, a clenched ball of flesh and bones, and I swiftly cut into a notebook with the point.

I spill the ink and my thoughts onto the paper and drag my hand across as I continue writing, thinking, expressing, and then the next thing I know, I had over two hundred notebook pages.

I titled this portfolio, “Putting the Jenna back in Generous” because I love to play on words, and I thought of this portfolio as giving back the gifts of knowledge I’ve received over the years in the form of the finished work. Every skill I’ve learned as a writer is displayed in this portfolio, including my dearest principles, morals, pearls of wisdom, and nearly every major and minor event of my life that I carry closest to me today. It is all now combined into one packet stapled shut and wrapped in plastic for someone else to learn from and take from what I have taken.

I have been writing and thinking as a writer for as long as I can remember, perhaps before I thought as an artist. Everything I learned was explained as an analogy, everything I said was supported by a metaphor. From childhood, my parents would have to sit patiently and listen as answered “how my day was” in the form of a short story, with a setting, plot, climax, and sometimes even cliff-hangers, which would usually frustrate them the most. I’ve always been known for talking a lot, and then always distracted, trying to observe the most.

My mind inhales and exhales information and thought, and there is no method more articulate when expressing ones mind then writing.

This portfolio includes my best work from this year, and will be a mile stone of the progress I’ve made as a writer since first entering high school, and a memento years from now of the progress I’ve made since graduating.

“#18 [Eighteen]” (2008)

[Poem about both the age and the sonnet – I’ll give a million cool points to who can specifically reference the inspiration of this piece. Oh, but, DISCLAIMER: Cool points cannot be redeemed for cash, only compliments and maybe a high five or two. -J.Young]

 

#18 (Eighteen)

Eighteen months later, I’m still at this desk,
Tallying the days since June Twenty-fifth.
I’m next to the phone, incase you should call.
Should you write, I moved it near the mail box.

I just sit and I stare… I double-take where,
I see familiar strangers with sun in their hair.

Eighteen months, over a year of my life.
Five hundred twenty days to be precise.
I’ve filled book aft’r book, this entire time.
I’ll run out of page ‘fore I keep you mine.

This case is hopeless, Yes, but regardless
The dream mixed with the memory
Producing endless poetry
Surpassing the beauty of reality

So, you are heartless, Yes, so I know this
Slither, shadowed by gallant fantasy
Facts dissolve in attractive mystery
They live longer then us, in infamy.

Once… I write it right, I write.
“It will once… I write it right.”

When you leave your things, you leave an excuse,
To converse, return, what we’ve been reduced.
Words cannot tell how, or what is true of:
When beauty lived and died as flowers do, love.

Someday, somehow, a letter will summarize
Immortalize passion that never dies.
I’m too much of a perfectionist
When its done I swear you’ll get it

But not this letter
I can do better.

The dream mixed with the memory
Producing endless poetry
Surpassing the beauty of reality
Facts dissolve in attractive mystery
 
Someday, somehow, a letter will summarize
Immortalize passion that never quite dies.

Once… I write it right, I write.
“It will once… I write it right.”

Eighteen
Months, your sunny blonde turned white.
Slither, Shadow, Six feet below sun’s light.
The dreams I had will eternally thrive
In publication of my written mind.

Once… I write it right, I write.
“It will once… I write it right.”