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The Best Poems (1999)
The best poems are the ones
That never get written.
Perfection lodged in the mind,
Broken by language,
Stretched by the effort
Of bringing them into the world.
A child of love rendered still
Born by the eyes of others,
Meaning rent into pieces
By the interpretation of meaning.
Perfection is in the eye of the maker.
- Josh MacLeod
1993
My first non-rpg related poem I ever wrote aside from some mother's day stuff. It remains unaltered from the original and is surprisingly good for a poem by someone who'd barely read poetry until them if I do say so myself. (Well, aside from Blake, which I think was the "mountains green" reference.)
| The Legends Are True | This is a poem I wrote after I'd read the story about ravens being kept in the Tower of London in England who would flee it if the city was in great danger. It was only later (after I'd shared it at a writers group) that I found out that the ravens actually did just before the boming of London. Apparently they found six new ravens the next day and put them in the tower with their wings clipped so as not to alarm the people. Scary, eh? |
It isn't illusion. That I write is a reality. Life is art and science. Look at your hand. What do you see? Flesh? Bone? Atoms? It's all moving. Electrons and quarks exist in constant motion. You think you know what reality is? Reality is an artefact of our senses.
- C J Cherryh, "Visible Light"
1994 - 1996
While I consider all of these poems now cringeworthy, they're being left because I think someone, somewhere might find it interesting to see some of my older work. I'm not putting any more of it on because, well, it mostly sucks. Badly :)
| The Lure Of Death | I wrote this poem around Christmas time, just to write. It was suppossed to reveal death from the point of view of the dying, someone left behind and the dead themselves. It's left here just because I once thought it was good. |
| The Chronicles of Creation | This was a large poem (over 800 lines) composed between 1994 and 1999, being 4 sets of 6 poems each about creation. I did originally plan to continue it with a fifth set but never did. |
| A Non-Anonymous Poem | This was a poem I wrote to myself shortly after I admitted to myself semi-officially that I was gay. I no longer recall the poem that spawned the idea, but it was titled an anonyous poem and was about self-discovery. |
| The Last Environmental Impact Statement | This was my first attempt at a really humourous poem. Like most such attempts it came out rather skewed :) It evolved from the whole idea of filling out an enviromental impact statement (a form filled out by companies etc. about wat projects might do to the environment) at the technical end of the world. |
If a conclusion is not poetically balanced, it cannot be scientifically true.
- Asimov
1999
These poems are, to me at least, somewhat worse than the previous ones, if only because they can be a bit pretentous. Quite a few of them seem to descend to the leve of academic word games and, especially in Ultima Thule, lead into very obscure images. Who knows, someone might find them neat. Or get a good laugh out of them.
| Listening To The Children | This poem was written after a friends grandmother overheard a speculative conversation between me and him about World War Two and if Hitler had won it. She pointed out that we could have that conversation entirely because he'd lost and from that comment this poem was born. |
| Claims Of A Stranger | Just a little, unedited and unchanged poem I wrote during a break at work once. It's nothing special - I actually don't like it at all now - but it was on the old version of the site, so here it is. |
| I Am Human | This was an odd little poem I wrote while thinking about not eating meat and how plants might feel. It was suppossed to have some sort of pattern with long and shorter lines but I'm not sure what it was anymore. |
| The Joys Of Night | I think this was an attempted song but I'm not sure anymore. It's also one of my few truly happy poems I've written, and deliberately sets out to make darkness into a nice time and place. |
| Thoughts | This is a largely unedited poem I wrote just after a friend of mine converted to Christianity and my thoughts on his conversion and religion in general at the time. |
| Ultima Thule | This was a poem I wrote after finding out about the idea of Ultima Thule, and that it means the end of the earth, being a last place to stand. Oh, yes, and the fellow in it is an astronaunt. |
| The World OF TV | This is just a poem I wrote about being desensitized to things, and stuff. You know. Boring stuff like that. |
"Words can never express the depth of religious conviction. They never have. That's another reason why we have art, and poetry -- because people can't nail it down. And, God help us, I hope we never can nail it down."
- Reverend Bill Phillips
2000
Some of these poems are decent. Most of my 2000 stuff got mixed into the 2001 due to revisions and such, so this section is a little sparse.
| Bulding For The Ages | This is one of my favourite short poems and was written while waiting for a bus outside my apartment. Who says late buses are bad things? |
| Choices | A quickie poem written at a workplace about choices and the price of making them. |
| Dancing | This was a poem I wrote while walking home from a mall and thinking that the leaves going across the parking lot was rain for a moment. |
| Travelling | This is just a short little poem about travelling, set up like a children's rhyme. |
If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate. The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies.
- Faulkner
2001
Most of these poems were written at odd moments. I'll put some of the more experimental poems into one of the grouped poem files below at a later date. Unfortunately, I arranged them alphabetically on the old site so other 2001 pooems will be added in the collection section rather than individual poem pages.
| A Poem Written In The Silence Of Sound | This poem was written while I was walking along some bike paths and came to a small brook I could sit down beside and forget the city around me for a moment. |
| A Self | This poem was begun during a religion class that asked us what we most feared and finished as a rough draft in a philosophy class about the self and mind. |
| Every Person | I think this poem was inspired by a line from one of Anne Michael's poems but I'm no longer sure. It's just a look at people and what we hide and why we hide it. |
| Growing Old | This poem was written while I was trying to think up a pome to write about my aunt's 50th birthday and just started looking at my hand and thinking. Needless to say, it wasn't said at the birthday :) |
| Haunting | This poem was a vague idea at work one day that became a poem during a "write a poem in X minutes" fun challenge. It's been revised a lot since then and might get included in the love poems below sometime as the ending to them. |
| How Dragons Die | An odd little poem written one day when I decided to make a poem with each line being one syllable less than the previous lines. |
| I.P.U. | Just a poem about them Invisible Pink Unicorns, naturally. |
| I Did Not Know | Just a quick poem I wrote after reading some modern poetry and probably having kicked a rock recently. |
| "Look who's coming to dinner." | My excuse for this poem was that I was reading Dhalgren at the time :) |
| Moonstruck | This is a revision of a revision of a rather horrible poem. More to the point, it takes the idea of the first poem and becomes something new and strange, with a fun hint of mythology in there as well. |
| Preaugraphy | Just a short little poem. |
| "That way madness lies" | A cheeful little poem I wrote just before April finals. I think I was a bit stressed at the time. |
| Untitled Poem Based On A Message Left On An Answering Machine | Just an untitled poem based on message left on an answering machine. To be accurate, it was one my brother and I shared and the message was some thing - possibly from a mopvie or something - dealing with homosexual tendencies. We never did find out who left it. Might have even been a random number, but it inspired this poem that same night. |
| Wanderings | A poem I wrote for my brothers birthday and the best poem I wrote that year, in my opinion. |
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
- T.S. Eliot
2002
This years poems, slowly being added to.
| Ruins | This is a poem I wrote after a conversation with someone about the war in Afghanistan. |
| When the lights are turned off | Just a nice little poem about a child and what happens when the lights go out. |
| The Body | Anatomy of a murder, poetry style. |
| If the world is nothing ... | An experimental poem where not only does it rhyme but each line is 31 characters of text. |
| Relative Absolutes | A poem written on a Greyhound bus after reading Richard Weaver's book Ideas Have Consequences and thinking about relatives and absolutes. |
| Paradise | A poem written about Kelowna while waiting for a bus really unhappily :) |
| Therapy | Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash. - Edmund White, "A Boy's Own Story "
Just a poem about someone and their therapist. |
| One Fine Day | Just a poem I wrote while thinking about salesmen. |
| A Death | Just a pome about a poor child whose mother just died and his parents reaction. |
| We Made Love Together | What can I say? I was doing housework one day and the first threee lines of this poem came to me out of the blue so I stopped and wrote the rest down. Everyone who's read it agrees it's weird. |
A poem should not mean
But be.
- Archibald MacLeish
Grouped Poems
These are poems that follow a theme (or close enough to be put together onto one page).
| Conversation & Truth Poems (2001 - 2002) | Conversation as a topic facinates me almost as much as truth, and they're often related so these poems deal with issues of truth telling and communication. |
| Songs | I wrote this poem on a spur of a moment, but no longer recall what prompted it unfortunately. |
| Lament | This poem was written when I found the first 4 lines as two lines in a notebook of mine, along with two attempts to make them into an official poem. I tossed them out the window and wrote this one. |
| Untitled | This was suppossed to be one of my joke IRC poems based on the first draft written during an English class where I started thinking about how useless formal education can be and how little of it we'll remember. It turned out to be too good for an IRC poem ironically. |
| The Truth Of Words | The Sanskrit phrase tad etad (this is that) learned in a religion course and some thoughts on logic led to this poem. |
| Biographies | I wrote this poem while writing a much longer one for my father for his birthday and thinking about summing up lives and how words distort things. |
| A Reason To Smile | I have no idea what inspired this poem, but it must have been something impressive. |
| Playing In A Sandbox | Just a poem about a kid playing in his sandbox. |
| Blather | A poem written shortly afer A Reason To Smile. |
| Voices | A poem written while thinking about language and how it traps us. |
| Scribbles | A poem written during an airplane flight at Christmas when I was clicking a pen open and shut and trying to decide what to write. |
| Seeking | Just a poem about enlightenment or something like that. |
| truths | A poem about truths and what they don't teach us. |
| Exactly Expressive | A silly little poem with each line beginning with the letter 'e'. |
| Talking | Another poem written on a bus, but a Greyhound this time. |
| Love Poems (2000 - 2001) | I know, love poems. I'm no romantic but somehow these slipped out of me over the course of a few months. It was only after reading them over that I realised they worked put into the order on the page. Only the last poem - Second Falling - was written as a deliberate part of this set. |
| Friendship | A poem about friendship, because that's what any relationship should begin with. |
| Untitled | A poem written for the Ottawa Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered youth group yearbook. |
| Falling Into Another | A poem I wrote one day after scratching down "In order to be able to fall in love you must believe you are worth being loved." It was written the same day as "That way madness lies" because I figured after finishing the former I needed to write a more upbeat poem. |
| A Love | One of my best short poems anbd perhaps my shortest actual poem so far. |
| Conversations | Just a lovely little poem about conversations. |
| Love Lost | A poem written after reading about breathing in a book on Yoga. |
| Words | A poem about understanding that I tried to make flow like a ballad would. |
| Second Falling | A reunion between two lovers, made to bring a sense of closure to the precedding poems. |
| Poems About Dreams (2001 - 2002) | Just some poems I've written about dreams and sleeping over the years. |
| Awakenings | A poem partially inspired by the times when I wake up with a jolt for no reason when half asleep and the islamic saying that "your sight is piercing today" when you die and be judged to go to heaven or hell before judgement day comes. |
| Dreams | Just a sad little poem about dreams held and lost. |
| Lights | A poem about memory where I tried to bridge a lot of odd images together. |
| The Siren's Call | I was tired, so I wrote a poem about sleep. |
| Tranquility | A little poem about being at peace. |
| dreaming | This poem was written while thinking about childhood fantasies. |
| Winter Poems (2001 - 2002) | I lived in Ottawa, so is it any surprise I wrote poems about the cold? :) |
| Falling | A very simple poem written a while back. |
| Winter | A pome about Ottawa, of course. |
| Walking | Same as the above, but a bit weirder since I focused on falling snow and it's eternal optimism. Really. |
| Scapes | A poem written on a bus while watching the city go by outside and reading the ads the bus had in it. |
| Winter Tree | A poem written about a tree while on the way to work one morning. |
| A Life | Just a poem about a snowflake. |
| Streets | A strange poem about an old man walking down a street in the snow. |
| Untitled | A small poem that becomes unpoetic for effect at the end. |
All bad poetry is sincere.
- Oscar Wilde
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