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.

Hollow

The earth has opened up
Sucking me in deep
Blackness surrounds
My life is lost

Huddled in my cold cell
I stare into the void
Blinded by darkness
My heart cries out

How could you betray me?
Am I not good enough?
Do I mean so little?
Or do you not realize?

Can you not see me?
Am I invisible in my misery?
Do my tears create a barrier?
Or do you not care?

Have I always meant nothing?
Has everything been false?
Do you not remember me?
Am I so insignificant?

Screams torn from me
Are unheard
Pleas made
Are ignored

My mind says move on
My heart has died
My soul is gone
And my tears scorch

Without you I am empty
A husk of nothing
Hollow and despondent
Everything has ceased

No hunger
No pain
No fear
Nothing

Take your sword
End it here
Stop this existence
Right your wrong

---

Honestly? This sounds like me this past weekend. All last week my coffee tasted wrong and I thought it was because I didn’t have my glass bottle, organic, free-range milk for my homemade lattes (Cheesus, I sound like some REALLY poncy person). I finally get my preferred milk, make my latte AND IT STILL TASTES WRONG. I am mortally betrayed. I don’t know what the fuck happened, but my COFFEE, the ONE THING THAT MAKES ME HAPPY IN THIS WORLD is FUCKED UP. Brazilian Helicopter Pilot (BHP) takes a sip and says, “I think they gave you coffee instead of espresso by mistake.” I am inches from throwing myself on the pyre and he thinks that is going to help.

But besides that, this poem still rings true to me as how I feel every morning before a proper cup of my favorite drug. People worry about me if they come across me pre-caffeine. BHP doesn’t like me to even joke about quitting caffeine. He just stopped cold turkey one day, but the thought of me even THINKING about it sends him into a cold sweat.

But REALLY this poem reminds me more of a story that was born in high school, more fully fleshed out in college, and then solidified here in NYC. It’s going to be a dramatic quartet about love….twuuuuuu wuuuuuuuv!!!! But with some *cough*probablyafuckinglot*cough* of drama, and PARTS MIGHT NOT END UP HAPPY!!!! I see some of you are confused. Typically, when I write a story, it ends happy. The most horrendous and crazy shit can happen to the characters, but they persevere and come out the other side stronger and with a monogamous love interest (I am working on portraying poly relationships).

This is something that made me feel different when I was working on my MFA. I was one of the only people in the program who actually seemed to want their characters to end up happy. Everyone else was writing these no-win scenarios where the main character comes out beaten and bloody (emotionally and mentally-speaking), but wiser for it, having scraped some important knowledge from having fucked up and not gotten what they wanted. My writing has always been, let me light this character on fire, dance on the charred corpse, resurrect them, drama drama drama and then LESSON LEARNED AND TRUE LOVE ACHIEVED.

Seriously though, one of the reasons I stopped reading as much was because I was tired of good/right endings always being so upsetting and/or hopeless. I have enough drag and grind in my day-to-day life, can you please just have some freaking light at the end of the tunnel? It’s why I think a lot of people in my MFA program thought my writing was immature. I didn’t want to write about infidelity and broken marriages constantly. I wanted to have humor and tension and finally a fitting ending where people have closure and happiness. So sue me. Yes, I know that not everyone gets their happy ending, but that’s the real world and I don’t necessarily have to write about that.

TL;DR – Poem is super dramatic. Michelle still hardcore relates.