Open Blog Poetry

In high school, I could never have written poetry as smart as the students in Bronx Masquerade – especially since I was so busy writing remarkably awful, melodramatic short stories, like the one about an emotionally unbalanced girl who ends the story by slashing a dozen lovely roses with a butcher knife into a pile of sweet-smelling floral guts. Because in my sheltered, nuclear-familied imagination, that’s exactly what people from a clichéd dysfunctional family (drunk dad, icy mom) did. Holy crap, I cringe at the very THOUGHT of anyone actually finding that tripe with my name on it. Fortunately, I also have journal upon journal full of entries from high school that are somewhat readable because they were about things I lived. And even more fortunately, I’d figured all that out by the time I got to college, signed up for a creative writing class and was forced to write a poem or two. Which is when I dug deep and unearthed some of the teenage angst I’d tried to forget. And at the age of 21, I still couldn’t write smart poetry, but at least I could finally write about high school from my heart.

So in the spirit of Bronx Masquerade’s Open Mike Fridays, I’m going to risk embarrassment (I’m already flinching) and share the untitled poem I wrote as an adult about my experience in high school:

Painted lips, lurid eyes, masks
at Mardi Gras, and hair so carefully forced.
In front of you, their sugar
-coated empty words drip
like honey
from pasted smiles. But behind
your back,
their vicious words are thorns.
Their slippery
Promises – a trap that lured
me, dutifully clinging,
exclusive.
And others’ envy – nectar
for the swarm from which
I fled.

Ok, now that I’ve run naked, it’s your turn. Maybe you don’t have a poem, but since so much of poetry is finding the right word, what’s your word (or two) to describe a feeling, a friend, an enemy, an incident or anything from high school?