I told you not to hold your breath for poetry. It’s about a month into the blog, so again, I hope you haven’t been holding your breath.Today is actually Preppy Bohemia’s first month out there, so that’s exciting. I figured to celebrate, I should actually put some writing out there. I think it’s kind of funny that my first creative writing sample is actually a piece of poetry. In my defense, it is prose poetry. I’m really not much of a poet. Anyway, I thought I’d get away from the personal essays for a bit.
This poem was inspired my a spontaneous trip to Chicago to see a concert. It was a beautiful night filled with friends and music and chai. I was in the final stretch of my senior thesis project when one of my dearest friends threw out this concert as an option. I got out of work early and three of us ran out of Grand Rapids for a beautiful night. It was a rainy night in April and as we left the concert, the city was encased in a fog that made everything look soft and glowing. From this, I was inspired. The poem is copied below.
My first instinct is always to run. Hardness comes with age, and time, and hurt, but that was not
why I wanted the road beneath me. Sometimes it just gets so damn difficult to think of how
to breathe. I slam my fists down on the desk and push my chair back and look to the ceiling
and sigh whatever words God will listen to first. I think about walking the gray sidewalks
surrounding silver buildings like moats, watching the lake in the distance between the steel
towers. There is freedom in the skyscraper jail – the anonymous nature of the suburban serf
hiding in the wealth of State St. In a bar on the north end, the mandolin plays the song I listened
to while avoiding life, overwhelmed by the requirements of adulthood. And wheeling down
Lakeshore Drive, watching the field of lights, ripe for the harvest, I return weary to what I
promised. The hardeness is gone for maybe only the three hour drive. But it was the song that
made the stone melt and the hole grow through its cracks. The water that fell on us as we ran
from the concert to the car helped the seed to grow and settle and root me to what I swore.
