False Start Valentine: Bad Poetry, Oh Noetry

We're back with more literary false starts, this time on le day le amour.  Please visit the others to maximize the love!  I've promised to break open my cursed necronomicon of verses.  Let the snickers commence.

In the earliest ones, from roughly 1985 to 1987, I stuck with common meter (fun fact: you can sing any Emily Dickinson poem to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas).  Topics ranged from the D&D-ish...

The magic that has gone away

Persuades us all to yearn

For that fine ecstatic day

The dragons will return.

to the self-help-ish...

Just leave me with my books and friends

And happy I will be.

For why live life as someone else,

When I can just be me?

The romantic stuff?  Gotta wait for it.  You first have to suffer through my discovery of T. S. Eliot and the modernists, when I started to incorporate automatic writing and hypnagogic words.  Here's "Sothis" in its entirety from 1991...

Fine fires of the nightly brigade,

Your eternal afterness rhythm circuits the sky.

Envision an ancient fear, human nation;

The rupture of seasonal scales, a ruddy

morning opal.

Drench to the western; rage to the decans!

Our guest, oblivionbound, evaporates

the hollow hypothesis.

Free as heartburn under an aesthetic sun.

What, you can't tell it's about a big controversy in the field of archaeo-astronomy?  :-)

My "masterpiece" from that time was a seven-part epic called Grand Unification.  It followed the form of the 7 chakras and tried to be an emanationist creation myth.  It was also quite terrible.

No, really.  Cringe-inducingly bad.  Trust me.  I don't think my problem was a lack of good ideas, but more an invincible unwillingness to edit my first drafts.  Once it was down on paper, it was sacred.  Add to that a surplus of name-drops from every bit of literature and mythology I had ever soaked up, and you get a very hot mess.  In looking it over again after many years, I see that, for some reason, the cringes come least when I'm asking questions... from this paean to a vacant creator god...

Our ignorance still plays on open ground

When we gaze into your infinitude.

Were you a nothingness bereft of soul?

Or was there magic in your solitude?

to this bit of musing on the third eye and exile...

Who fights for the night in spite of first light?

And blinded by brightness sets out to unite?

Who fashions with passion and full of grim ration

The thirtytwo musical names of compassion?

Who looks out on a cosmos distressed to destroy?

Driven mad by diversity only sees joy?

Who prays to a misanthrope harlequin ghost

In twilight agape before all nature's host?

Certainly not as terrible as the other parts -- at least here weren't any ham-fisted allusions to James Joyce, Joseph Campbell, and Conan the Barbarian -- but still in need of a lot of work if I were to ever want to do anything with it.

I was so this guy.

Thereabouts 1990 or so came the Serious Relationship that launched a thousand doggerel-filled ships.  It took me a while to figure out which piece of lovey dovey-ness to post.  I boiled it down to a choice between two extremes: one optimistic (all beginnings and rainbows) and one pessimistic (all moody and obsessive).  The choice fell on the fact that all of my forays into sunshine and lollipops were just plain trite and BAD. Oh, the darker one is also bad, too, but maybe the depth of genuine, albeit raw, feeling pulls it through.

Don't worry, though.  There is happiness at the end of this post.

Let me also preface it by making it clear that names have been changed to protect the not so innocent.  Okay, now I'll give you what you came here for.  This is "Liebestod."

I still don't sleep Justine.

I thought it was over Justine.

But in a dream Justine.

Your face was before me Justine.

I walk through the crowds Justine.

I listen to the people who know the answers Justine.

I drink and I joke Justine.

I read my books Justine.

And your face is before me Justine.

I want to remember Justine.

I want to forget Justine.

I look at my pictures of you Justine.

I remember the feel and taste of you Justine.

I laugh for your energy Justine.

I cry for your pain Justine.

You fade away Justine.

And all that I am Justine,

Although I know better Justine,

Still needs you

Justine.

Yee-ikes.  In a recent TV show, the characters were musing about obsession in love, and how there's just a thin, thin line between a "Dobler" and a "Dahmer."  I think that just writing the above was enough to get the obsession out of my system... And also, just a month or two after all that unpleasantness, I met the woman to whom I've now been happily married for 21 years.  There's been lots of poetry there, too, but I'm not posting that.  :-)