Where I Grew Up

3/18/2016

Passing pastures of green, spotted with cows
where magic mushrooms pop from manure,
roadside wildflowers grow pink, purple, and yellow
while their roots permeate the aquifer below.
The clock on my wrist tick ticks
as my thoughts unravel,

unraveling as my tires turn. For a universe
as interconnected as my crochet sweater,
it seems rather difficult to feel cozy inside.
Outside brings better weather atop the one
and only town hill. There the sun rests royal
every evening dressed in clouds of clementine.

Standard sinkholes serve as inverted jungle gyms
for kids like I was; climbing rocks, roots, trunks, and branches
with the bark of a bugs back, being careful to keep balance.
Partnering in crime with nature was living
on the edge back then. Time passes and
the sun slips down from his throne to sleep.

The two lanes bend and wind round.
I pullover once his indigo blanket is draped overhead.
I lie down on the warm engine hood
while crickets and cicadas sound in my ear.
They whisper secrets of comfort as I gaze up
to the astronomical eyes of homey night skies.

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Mostly in a state of existential crisis, wrapped up in my own mind and in the thoughts that weigh heavy through cyclical depression. Thoughts consisting of anxiety and unhappiness about school, society, humanity, the world, the waste, the ignorance, and my own inner conflicts of knowledge and memory cause constant yearning to exist in a more positive and productive state. My writing through this time has reflected the tendencies I have to think too much, my resolution being through doing art and through connecting with nature. My writing process is usually different every time. Sometimes by compiling small phrases I’ve jotted down in my notes, other times by writing stream of consciousness, and others are more about what word sounds intrigue me. I have found that my writing reads best when I utilize all of these tactics together.
Writing is an excellent outlet to plug emotional struggles into even though I have been known in the past to have difficulties using words to express myself. Using poetry as a form of expression is beautiful for the reason that it doesn’t require words to form around accurate depictions but rather to form around feelings whether temporal or constant, right or wrong. Poetry takes the form of my anxieties and makes them less of a burden to bear inside. Once the anxieties are outside I can more objectively put into perspective the way I am feeling, sometimes to make me realize I am tackling too much and sometimes to realize I am justified however moot the point may be. Either way I learn through the writing process every time and really enjoy going back to reread the words I’ve linked together and attached to a page.
Figurative language has become a handy tool I now use in all aspects of life in order to help better analog my thoughts more adequately to another being. I’ve found through poetry and its toolkit of things like: figurative language, assonance, and alliteration, that words have a way with making beautiful sounds and making beautiful pictures just as effective to me as music or painting. I enjoy working with words, manipulating them in this way, in order to find how they can be operative in describing sensations. Sometimes I’m not even sure how I feel until I try to sit down and actually put words to the problem. Many times painting helps me to dig up the feelings and poetry helps me to unveil their many roots infiltrating into different aspects of life. Turning my brain inside out to empty all of the thoughts onto the page keeps them from eating away at my mind. On the page they seem safer to observe.
Reading Zachariah Wells’ poetry helped me to realize that existential dilemmas and the problems that I face on a deep emotional level are accessible and combatable through poetry. The profound element of poetry is magnificent in that it can delicately describe something so simple and yet also has the ability to reach into the depths of an abstract idea and bring out its concrete form for others to understand. I have a tendency in my writing, and in life, to be very vague and descriptive in unsuccessful ways. Through the course of this semester I feel that I have made positive strides through learning when to embrace the ambiguity and when to hone in on a certain element or idea I want to address within a poem. I will continue to write poetry, to grow in my writing style, and to cope in this way because I find it to be incredibly fruitful.

Where I Grew Up

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