Poetry is a funny thing. I kinda hate it.
But also, I really like it, some of it.
For the most part, I find it hard to understand. I think maybe I pay too much attention to the words. Or maybe I read the words like prose, which of course makes it sound disjointed and crap. I think you’re supposed to read poetry out of the corner of your eye. Kinda like squint at it.
There’s poems I really like, Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy. It’s about a woman who gives her lover an onion on Valentine’s day instead of the usual gifts. It’s fully of really nice images like, “I give you an onion./It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.”
Imagine getting a moon wrapped in brown paper! How totally awesome would that be! It would be all glowing and small, and you could keep it in your bag whenever you needed light or whenever you just wanted to look at a little moon. It’s like the ultimate office toy, a Newton’s cradle but a million times better. If anyone has a moon in brown paper, tell me where you got it, because I want one.
So anyway. I think you’re supposed to enjoy the images and stuff. I’ve always liked little bits of sentences and nice words and things. Like “optical” and “five”. Those are good words.
I can’t take a whole poem though, so maybe a good way of reading poems would be to take it to pieces and enjoy each little bit at a time. You could spend as much time reading a poem as you do reading a novel that way.
Anyway, the whole point of this post was to introduce a new poem I wrote. It literally took about 10 seconds to write, it’s like the best poem ever.
It’s called “I had a friend once”, and it’s all lies. I never had a friend called Jacqueline. Read it!