NPO #36: Desert Life
a.k.a. The Poetry-master.
This is the surprise, Ticketholders!
For you and for someone in my family who's having a special day this week. But also for me, because I've been looking for this poem of mine for years. I mentioned it and gave a quick synopsis in my review of Zenescope's April Fools Editions earlier this year, and now that I've found it, I can breathe a sigh of relief. Well, another sigh of relief, anyway, because it also felt really good to be free of gambling debt and to only have my student loans to worry about going forward.
But the poetry is the point today, so let's talk about it. Despite what I said in the Zenescope review I linked above, I was thirteen when I wrote it as part of an "exiting middle school for high school," art/literature/poetry project called "The Book Of Me." It was received well enough by school staff that it was selected for publication in a book of student poems (that I have long since lost my copy of), and stood out amongst pages of basic, misspelled prose where other young teens rhymed about their favorite foods or colors or how much they like ponies. Not the most sophisticated company for a newly pubescent kid with motor delay and possible undiagnosed autism writing a free-verse simile about struggle, social anxiety, and identity crises, is it?
Sorry about my pride getting a little gloaty, folks; here's the poem:
Desert Life
Sitting alone in the company of nature
on a rugged mountain silhouette,
listening to the sandy footsteps of the howling wind.
Appreciating the good things,
and accepting the bad things
of my Desert Life.
Like the desert rain that never touches the ground,
I face my problems one drop at a time,
persisting further.
And once I climb a high enough mountain,
I can relieve the dryness of the past
with the rainwater
of my Desert Life.
Like the multicolored sunset,
life has some dark points, and some bright.
When I reach the boundaries of the desert,
achieving all my goals,
I'll finally know what I want to be
for the rest of my Desert Life.
I'm really proud and nostalgic about this piece (or Piece Offering, as it is now, and if I didn't hold it in a place of pride in my heart, I wouldn't have kept looking for it for over thirty years). But I can acknowledge how some of the lines don't have logical flow, how juvenile the language is in places, and the final stanza's conflation of self-fulfillment and self-actualization with what is basically death imagery; relief as an end, rather than an intermission or a time of retrospection and planning. And I don't think I've outgrown that mindset because I still live in the present, looking backwards and thinking of the future as some distant stretch of ideal perfection. The only difference is that I'm more bitter and cynical now about whether I will even want that ideal time, person, or thing in my life once I see the truth and complexity in it for myself. And the world isn't getting any better....
Stay Tuned for happier things (like Zenescope - Omnibusted and Goj-Year-ra tackling secret government monster eugenics?) while I binge To Your Eternity and work on my big milestone project.
As always, please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (none of you have yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read because cash rules everything around me, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
12
Cynic-master,
Out.
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