Poems Encrusted with History

Oh, How I miss You

I've been writing poems for years, but I never shared them online even though I've been a part of several different writing communities. So, I recently decided it was time to put myself out there. I love writing and I want to become better at it so doing this holds me responsible. What I have put together for this isn't much, it's just a collection of some of my favorites. They are mostly from the years 2016 and 2017 because as you will learn through my poetry, I lost a very close friend which in turn made me very unstable mentally so writing was what helped me cope. I also fought a lot with my father specifically, we have never had a good relationship, so this is how I took out my anger.

The first two poems I share here were done for a creative writing class, but the rest were done on my own. Only the poem Oh, How I miss You and the poems on the last chapter have a specific form as well. The rest don't follow any rules. The first poem I had to analyze so I added the analysis as well. The second poem has two forms, the first is the refined version the second was done when I was full of a lot of different extreme emotions.

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Oh, How I miss You

Sadness comes in bits and pieces
Like the waves on some distant shore
It rises and falls in tune with natures beat
You cannot fight the changing tides

Like waves on a far shore
My volatile moods gulp down sea water
You can't challenge the changing tides
How poisonous these fickle things are

My mercurial moods slosh down sea water
In hopes of finding you under their depths
How poisonous these arbitrary topics are
All I want is to see you smile

In hopes of finding you within the depths
I forced my heart to slow under the waves
All I want is to see you smile
Then I'd willingly stay afloat
10/9/16

This poem is in the form of a pantoum, with the repeating lines I was trying to show how desperately I wanted my best friend who, passed away almost a year ago [note: it has almost been four years now], back. I was also showing how I can't change what happened, I can't "fight the changing tides", he died and there's no changing that. At the time of his passing I just wanted to give up hence the line about gulping down sea water to drown out all the pain and forcing "my heart to slow under the waves" so that maybe I would be able to see him again in another life. In all, I wanted to show how obsessive I was about his passing and even in a way, my own sadness, that all the small talk of him trying to make me believe he was okay was what "poisoned" him in the end, that I should have known better but I didn't and in the end there was nothing I could do. It made me feel helpless and how helpless we are to the ocean.

I compared sadness to the waves on a shore because I was reminded of this quote by a lady of the name, Nicole Gabert:

"Grief, after the initial shock of loss, comes on in waves. When you're driving alone in your car, while you're doing the dishes, while you're getting ready for work... and all of a sudden it hits you how so very much you miss someone, and your breath catches, and your tears flow, and the sadness is so great that it's physically painful!"

I saw this quote a few months after I lost my best friend and it forever stuck with me because I remember thinking that I never thought it was possible to feel so much pain, that somehow, a year later, I would have moments where I would just break down into tears. Yet it is true. It does come in waves. Sometimes a few months will pass where everything will be completely fine but then there will be that one day where it feels like someone bashed my chest in with a baseball bat. It is amazing how much you feel that sort of pain not only mentally but physically which is part of why I made so much of this physical movements of something that tends to be thought of as a more mental experience. I was in a way trying to show both the mental and physical because with "fighting the changing tide", you physically cannot change how the world works but also you mentally cannot rip yourself apart for something that is just a part of your nature.