I feel stupid for not knowing that April was national poetry month.  In my college days I was infatuated with the medium, and tried my hand at several poetic ideas. I fooled around with turns of phrase and meter, but never rhyme.  For some reason rhyme just never appealed to me. 

I kept all of my poems, and just recently dug them up.

So, just to prepare you, I will be posting my doggerel jottings through the end of the month under the blog title “operation poetry” so that you can avoid them if you wish.

That’s right, let me be clear to all you people who already view my blog as an exercise in public embarrassment: I’m going to publish the poems I wrote in college here for the next few days.  I’ll present the poem first, then a few notes on why I wrote it and what I was thinking. I expect the comments section might show some…ridicule.  I am ok with that. [EDIT: which doesn't mean I won't delete them if I feel like it.  :>]

I’ll start it off with something called Rampant Blue.

There is only cold in respected night
Until that bright daughter rises slowly
bleeding her color across the black-
glittered satin without truly transmitting the light
The only man that matters then is the one most
questioned by the young.

Rampant Blue rules for a daylight and in his realm he is enormous
Deep and flat he’s stroked across by a glimpse
and no more of his warm fabulous land;
and try as one might the kingdom of the cloth
With its holes of that same shining, never seen place
cannot be seen until his rampant hue retires.

Which he does at the daughter’s whim.

I’ve found most of my writing in college revolved around everyday things seen in poetic ways.  For almost every poem I have here (and don’t worry, it’s not many) I can fall through the wormhole to the very moment I wrote it and what I was thinking.  In this case, I was fascinated by the sky one day.

In San Marcos, Texas where I went to school, you get a lot of bright blue sky, hence the line about “the one most questioned by the young.”  But it was that hook of kids asking “why is the sky blue” that I thought of the phrase “Rampant Blue”.  In a bit of gender bending, the daughter was meant to be the sun, and the cloth was the idea of the atmosphere being a canvas ranging from the bright blue of a solid color to a glittered satin at night. I just thought the idea of a poem about something so simple as the blue sky could be rich with some type of world or hierarchy. And that the sky during daylight would rule a rampant conformity of the color blue that would have to retire before you could see the diversity of the night sky.

I like this work a lot because it sets up an almost “king’s court” amongst the elements of night, sun, and sky.

Anyways, of all the jottings I did, I only have a dozen or so I think are worth the Internet ridicule of my friends to endure, so I thought it would be fun to post them for discussion.

Tomorrow I’ll post a much shorter piece called “Portfolio.”