When I was seventeen, I wrote a poem
rejecting what I called 'Suburban Love,'
as represented by the type of home
that middle class's newlyweds dream of.
Addressed to someone whom I didn't love,
it priviledged torment, promiscuity
over losing desire for what I couldn't have--
that wouldn't make me happy anyway.
But what was happiness at seventeen?
I look at life with you, and still don't have
Sylvania lighting, high-end floors. Between
mild luxury and poverty, we live
weighted with bills, from month-to-month, and day--
and knowing love, would have it what other way?
Perhaps it's not fair to write a poem that responds to a poem that, for all practical purposes, is lost. It was called "No Suburban Love," and what I can remember of it goes like this:
I'll never have that soft suburban love
Adorned with plush carpets, [....], a cat
I want to layer pain upon pain, and live
remembering faces in you--after you--after you.
The last line imagines a succession of lovers who would not necessarily be satisfactory because of the lover who was lost, but who would echo that lost lover in some way. I remember writing it, and I do remember the painful longing that characterized that particular point in my life. I believe I was actually 18--not seventeen, but seventeen had the right number of syllables for my purposes here. In a way, too, this poem was an expression of my desire to 'strive for the infinite' rather than settling down into complacent domesticity. Little did I know that domesticity would not necessarily bring rest from striving...
4 comments:
I don't think any apologies are necessary for referencing a poem that exists only in your memory. I think anyone who dabbled in poetry as a teenager can probably relate to having penned something of the kind. The particular egregiousness of each person's adolescence might differ, but don't all of us suffer from an excess of some kind or another? In any case this put me in mind of a poem I wrote in my sophomore year in high school, a very different poem but oh the romanticism! What's particularly tough about that one is that my mother had a copy of it posted on the kitchen cabinet for years and still quotes it at me. She did so again just recently. Ugh.
Ugh indeed! That's kind of funny, though. I mostly kept my poetry under wraps.
To be fair at the time I was quite proud of it. Turned it in for a school assignment even. But ouch. That was a long time ago.
I completely understand. The one I reference here was part of my portfolio for one of my undergrad poetry classes. It was actually a more mature effort. But the worldview is one I have a love-hate relationship with now.
I remember taking offense when a poetry professor said that his first book--which I quite enjoyed--was his "baby book," because he wrote it at more or less the stage of life where I was currently. To be fair, he was brusque and a little dismissive, and quite arrogant in a poet-who-benchpresses-a-lot kind of way. But I understand now... Although, at least his was published! Wait--that was pretty much the point,too! ;)
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