Welcome to the new Tuesday installment! It’s Poetry Tuesday! We are going to go back through all my old notebooks and look at the god-awful poetry I wrote when I was an angsty teen and then you will get present day Michelle’s re-interpretation/headdesk horror-filled embarrassment.

Caress

Your voice slides over my skin
A silk caress that steals my breath
It feels as though you’ve never left

This is a masterpiece of a poem – because it is unfinished. Sorry for the very short poem, but I am actually quite glad that baby Michelle never finished this one because it looks like I was going to try to write an extremely cliched and overly dramatic romance poem that would have made present Michelle cringe. I am basing this observation not on the fact that all my previous poems have been very cringe-worthy, but on the last line “It feels as though you’ve never left” that is prime material for a long poem wailing about abandonment and true love and waiting forever and ever and ever.

Let’s look at the ways in which this poem could have gone:

1. Abandonment/waiting forever – the sort of “I still feel you in my dreams” titanic level of “you are gone by my heart still goes on.” As we all know, that is a very unhealthy mentality. Very romantic and fun to work with, but ultimately not helpful for reality
2. Maybe the narrator is blind or has synesthesia which is why ze can “feel” hir lover’s voice on hir skin
3. Maybe the narrator has a voice kink and can get off by hir lover’s voice alone
4. Masturbation while hir lover is away on a business trip or at work
5. Um…sex sex sex sex because that was what teenage Michelle often had on her brain

I would offer to try to finish the poem, present Michelle finishing Baby Michelle’s work, but as I have said in the tags many times – I am by no means a poet. Poetry is an art that requires extreme discrimination when it comes to word choice and exquisite imagery. There is a reason why I write prose and novels. I have too many words in my head and the thought of distilling them down into short, powerful jabs is an overwhelming prospect. I also am not a master of imagery. I do not see the world the way I imagine a poet does. I abuse metaphor and simile in a way that makes writers cringe. Do not get me wrong, I can have my poetic moments, but they are few and far between.

Since this week was so short, let me recommend a few poems:

For You by Kim Addonizio
The Wife of Jesus Speaks by Mary Karr
God Made a Little Gentian by Emily Dickinson
The Glass Essay by Anne Carson