About Bad Poetry

Why if I think its so bad, am I posting my old poetry? Because its FUNNY. Seriously. Its amazing how dramatic one can be over something and then years later find it hilarious.

I always hated the phrase "everything happens for a reason." I think that's bullshit. There are a lot of things that happen without some happy ending attached.

BUT I tend to believe that "everything happens for a story." Good or bad, there's eventually something to tell. And the story itself is usually interesting.

There's a lot that I have learned about myself by reading these old bits of writing. Take the last poem I put up for example, "Her." I wrote it right around my 20th birthday. Peter and I had broken up about 8 months earlier but that winter began to rekindle things a little. Or so I thought. Next thing I know I get an instant message from him reading "Things are cool between us now, we know we're friends and nothing more, right?" I asked if he was wondering because he was suddenly in some relationship or something. "Yeah, kinda," was his reply. I immediately signed offline.

When I read the poem I think it's interesting that its almost entirely focused on me not looking right. I was too tall, too fat, too pale; my hair too curly. I recalled over the summer when he referred to Britney Spears as "too beefy" while admiring Christina's "heroin chic look." Its not until the end that I even think that there might be other reasons he would choose someone else over me, that they had similar interests, got along differently. It hardly occurred to me that anything other than my physical self was at play.

Of course, I was just an insecure child. Later, Peter told me I was by far the most attractive girl with whom he had ever been involved (which is true, I've met most of his exes over the years). It was mostly about timing that things didn't work out. But looking at that poem, there's a story much deeper than just what happened between he and I. Those are the things I'm fascinated in now finding out.

Plus, looking back, it seems so silly.