My poetry sucked back then, a sorry mix
of adolescent pain and ignorance,
dormant-tree metaphors, bleak sky and rain,
cold rain — my poems’ rain was always cold —
and I watched, staring out through leaded panes
at winter landscapes, shades of brown and gray
orders of magnitude more colorful
than my heart’s anemic range of hue.
That’s just the way it works, of course. That’s just
the way the adolescent’s heart is wound,
or how mine was at any rate, a wild
indignant void, alone, too smart by half
and less intelligent than the fabled
sack filled with hammers. I wore no scars then
except the loneliness they issued me
at birth, a sick and swelling sense of need
unmet, and here and there a festering
parental accusation of complete
and utter uselessness. No one had cracked
the heart that pined oblique in scattered sheaves
of onionskin, pale lines of type on them,
ten point elite, the Q and upper case
A nearly gone. My poetry sucked back then,
a sheer simplistic longing for a touch
I had not known, indignant that a world
of lovers did not recognize my worth
and come to me. It’s lost, it’s better lost,
all burned one angry night, all left behind.
I have forgotten nearly all of it,
stanza and line, my memory seared
then salted like some Punic battlefield
after a Pyrrhic love had conquered it.

1. 
   Bill 2010 03 12 at 6:24:45 am

   Was burning the poems cathartic or just losing bad memories?

   Bill

2. 
   KMTBERRY 2010 03 13 at 11:59:32 pm

   ONE OF YOUR BEST!!!!!

3. 
   dale 2010 03 14 at 11:34:43 pm

   :-)  that’s all I ask: a wider range of hues. Thank God for the accumulation of years! It hasn’t brought wisdom yet, but it has brought color.