Poetry might be the death of me…..

My Memoir Writing class is causing me to have to think about the past and causing me to write new ways. Sometimes you can’t teach an old dog (me) new tricks… but… I’m having to learn.

Recently I’ve been having to write poetry. I don’t care for poetry. I really don’t like looking for hidden meanings. I’d rather something be spelled out for me because I may take it one way while you take it a different way and it was intended to be a completely different way.

So this week I was challenged to write one of my essays into a free verse poem. I took that as a challenge and made a 7 page Memoir essay into a Haiku. If you don’t know what a Haiku is, it’s a Japanese poem form that has 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables.

That’s it, 3 lines.

Haiku (remember, I suck at poetry!)

She didn’t want kids
He convinced her otherwise
Then she was happy

I laughed so hard while writing this… and after. It happens sometimes.

Then I took my assignment seriously. So I had to take a part of one of my essays and turn it into a free verse poem. So here is the text that I used:

Every time we fight I’m transported back to when things were simpler, or at least now they feel simpler. Back when I was in junior high and high school I would watch Boy Meets World. Corey and Topanga were high school sweethearts who made it through a lot and went on to get married. Even though that is a television program, I always wish that I could, just for once have married my high school sweetheart. I guess truthfully if you think about it I did, but we never dated in high school.

Keep in mind that this is just a paragraph out of a 7-8 page paper and there is a lot before and after this paragraph. But here is my free verse poem:

I hate to fight
Let’s go back to a time
A time when it was simple
Back to a time that meant so much more
A time that was like a tv show
A time when high school sweethearts could make it
They wouldn’t mess up, they just marry
But life isn’t a tv show
People mess up
People move on
Life goes on
Things don’t turn out like they did in the eye of a child
Maybe we never dated in high school
But in the end I did wind up marrying my high school sweetheart.

And that right there is my extent of poetry….