A Mirror Floating in Water

In light of OrphanPip's new blog posts, I have decided to post something that I have been thinking about posting for a while.

Around six months ago I was assigned in school to write a brief narrative of your life. I instead wrote within a week what turned out to be a ninety-four page autobiographical poem concerning mainly my childhood and with that, my nostalgia, my guilt and my relationship with my mother.

I'm only going to post this poem in excerpts, as it is too lengthly and has some dull part that should be edited but I have found the process too painful. In fact, I've only read it once all the way through, finding the trip down memory lane to be a painful one indeed. Not because my childhood was a horror (quite the opposite), but because it is the past, and the thought of the passing of time terrifies and depresses me.

Okay, enough rambling. I will admit that this poem is quite abstract (though relatively more straight-forward than other poems of mine) and starts out as fragmentary memories, until it evolves into more fuller and detailed tales of the past.

I will acknowledge Joyce's and Eliot's influence, escpecially the works Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as The Waste Land. Either way, here we begin.
(take note also, that very little of this poem has been edited due to my own psychological complications in editing it, so don't expect supreme poetry).


Shored Against my Ruins

Intro
First there was the suffocating city
These connections and interconnections
Tower over me as we drive
Drive, drive, drive into the sun
And fly out, away from memory


I.
See the colorful balls juggle up against gravity
Push push push
We must clean up this mess
Wooden walls around
Wooden walls surround
One is smiling
And one is frowning
Door on one end
And floor on another
See the colorful balls juggle up against gravity
Carpet hard wood floor
Cannot recollect that far ahead
Or back
Was the carpet dirty and worn?
Or was the wood cold and hard?
When you are young, such things are not so disturbing
Blurry, see only my feet
See the colorful balls juggle up against gravity
Dream and real
Dream to be real
Time shall arrange itself accordingly
But not now
Time has lost its lucidity
But why care? Let’s just play with our toys
Let us just see those colorful balls juggle up against gravity

Bring me darkness, like those Norwegian storms
Quiet
For I wish to hear the whispering of the wind


II.
We flew south for the winter
As you know, the ocean has now frozen
If it was so
If it was so
For then papa bird shall fly home
And then we shall all smile and no longer be alone
But no, enslaved to the mountainless landscape
Daddy has sailed far away
Not calling on the telephone

Shall we now be all alone?
Sitting on the beach, watching the waves curl up upon the shore
‘Listen to the heartbeat of the water
Do you hear? Do not worry what is happening over there
Let us sail out against the shores
Mutiny of the captain, now I have seen
The fate of memories long past
Said to me in a dream, my conscience, it said
“ Come, come out with me to the shore
For if the boat shall not sink
You shall here the gulls calling once again
On golden sands at the brightest dawns”’

Paint on my hands, cover the walls
Sand on my heels, immerse in water
‘Let us go, let us leave’
And the three of us left
Sand shuffling at our feet

Let us begin our story, all over again
Our prologue has ended and time has come
For new beginnings
We shall go to grandmother’s house, we shall go
And sip hot coco, as we decide what to do
And wait