First you beat it out in a heartbeat
Then you mix in
all the memories you can find
in your mind and you kind of
knead them because you need them
to create the texture of life,
then you take a knife
and chop chunks of hate
and don't hesitate
to be generous with it
as long as you offset it with
sufficient slices of love.
Take all of the above
and wrap it up in your soul
Drop in a few tears
for all the years of struggle
Smuggle in a pinch of sex
Next, confine it in rhyme
And let it sit overnight
in the morning
you'll behold the sight
Of yourself
Laid out right there
In the ink.
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This is a poem I wrote a long time ago. Looking back at it now, I see it as being kind of crude, unrefined and a little bit full of cliché, but I like it. If a cliché is right, it's right. I usually leave my old poems alone because I feel like they're a bit like a picture of how I was at that time. They are a blot of ink on a page created and interpreted by me at a point in time. Now that I'm older and more experienced, I may interpret that blot differently, but it is still the same ink and the same piece of me that I left on the page so long ago.
Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you thought in the comments below.
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