ASPEN part I

Abstract

This Epic Poem is about the pandemic as much as it is about Aspen. It focuses on her experience of being sent home from college exacerbating her anxiety and depression. It does not help that she has a creature who latched onto her when she was born. This poem might sound and feel less like a poem and more like prose because of the lack of rhyme and unified rhythm, but that is intentional. The parts that have rhyme are narrator driven or description driven. This gives the feeling of a storyteller reciting this Epic Poem. Alas, this piece is only one part of Aspen's story because there is much more I want to explore. Rain and Lia are lovely characters to write, but there was no time or space to give them the attention I would have liked. Therefore, I will expand Aspen, Rain, and Lia's stories in the future.

Part I

Listen, for this is a story of our time.

Aspen, lived during 2020,

while Covid spread sickness and death

throughout the fearful globe.

Exhaustion possessed each person

and Aspen was no exception.

She sat slumped with her head resting

against the rough surface of the wooden table,

arms out-stretched. Her fingers, torn up

and bleeding from chewing them raw,

trembled in the cool breeze which flowed

through the dark trees shrouded in mist.

She heard mourning doves cooing from

their hidden perches in far up branches.

Aspen dragged her hands towards herself.

She could not muster the strength to use her neck muscles

to raise her head from the table.

Yet the pressure on her forehead

was a welcome distraction.

Covid took great-grandma, and Mom worked from home.

There was no rest, and too much sleep.

Isolation, or lock-down-

Aspen felt locked in and locked out.

At least she had escaped the house

before darker things took over.

Something watched from the shadows

in her room. She could pretend those

shrouded eyes and the fools online

ceased their burrowing into her

already reeling mind. Thus,

her head stuck fast to the table.

Gravity seemed stronger than normal.

Maybe this was the doing of

the seemingly sentient

room-shadow. It never came out,

yet its oozing presence remained.

Aspen especially felt it

loom, when she was one her laptop