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.

Dream Girl

With unfocused eyes she stares at her paper,
As people talk, about do her thoughts caper.
A small smile graces the parted lips,
Before across the paper dances her pencil’s tip.
She’s a dream girl,
In her own dream world.

In a moment’s time she will stop,
And begin to play with her dark brown mop.
Between her eyebrows will appear
A little wrinkle that is to fear
Because she’s a dream girl
In her own little world

More inspiration hits
It comes in pieces and bits
Until it all makes sense
Even to those who are dense
I’m the dream girl
In my dream world

I live in my stories with my friends
Who aren’t always real, it depends
From a child making glasses play
To a teenager who writes of light and dark, humans and fey
Me the dream girl
I rule my dream world

Barbie’s, Beanie Baby’s, toys and Lego’s
Replaced by music, dreams, books and alter egos
Instead of dress up in the attic, Mom’s make up and worms
I go to dances, stay up late, type and watch as incense burns.
As the dream girl grows
So does her dream world

Okay, let’s ease me back into this series with something a little bit easier to stomach. This is an autobiographical poem about me growing into adolescence. Lemme just say, I made manic pixie dream girl fun before it was a thing. As I read this, I remembered how proud I used to be of these poems and how I would hunt down my mom and read them to her as soon as they were finished. I never edited them, I barely gave a fun about word choice. It was SPONTANEOUS and ARTISTIC and ME! ACCEPT MY ARTISTRY!!!!

What is most fun about this poem are the memories coded into it – the hours I would spend on the phone with my best friend going back and forth about this character and that character. Passing notebooks back and forth where we each wrote an alternating chapter. Arguing over how someone had their chapter end. How mad my sister would get because whenever it was my turn to wash dishes as a child I would end up playing out stories with the glasses and silverware and it would, without intervention from my mother, take hours for me to wash all the dishes. My full blown obsession with seelie vs unseelie. The soap opera level dramas I would create for my Barbies. The scraps of fabric I would cut holes in and dress my Beanie Babies in. How I would never share the “shiny” and “cool” Legos with my cousins. Listening to the radio FOR HOURS for that ONE SONG. Calling in and requesting that song. Playing in the attic when it was so cold that we would have to duck back into the house to warm up every so often. The time I shamed my sister for not being excited to see me because I had “given up a perfectly good worm” for her!

Like my other pieces it is amateur and fanciful. It thinks it is doing more than it actually is. But I like this one because it helps me remember my roots and think of myself a little more fondly than I might. So here is to the New Year, a new Michelle (working hard to eat healthy and exercise), and to old Michelle who spit on that bully and got in every asshole’s face so that I could sit here today and type this missive to you.