i got distracted and found a thread between my best friend and myself. a lot of our correspondence reads like love letters. in this thread, i included a poem (below) i wrote for an advanced poetry workshop during my last semester of college. i remember, after my experience with that particular professor, i decided i needed to take a break. i haven't written a poem since, and looking back, it's hard. there was a time when i identified as a poet, when i would continue to be a poet.
and then i just stopped, in much the same way i stopped being a musician. now i'm a photographer. i wonder what i'll be ten years from now and wish i could be all of those things at once.
i remember this poem being really difficult for me. it invokes my best friend and my second girlfriend (best friend's first love, in fact), and i guess you can see in it that i'd just discovered photography, too. the last stanza is awkward. regardless, there's something i really love about this poem, even if it is trite.
Art School
I keep finding letters you've written,
the familiar curve and loop of your 'y' so similar to mine;
the outline of your hand, traced carefully in black ink
on blue-lined paper in such a way that I felt we could never falter,
you would never fall away.
And then there's your smile in a glossy black and white shot,
candid, from when we were aspiring art students in red rooms.
They call it burning film and you were the fire. I wonder if
the curve of your lips has changed with time and disappointment,
have your teeth
shifted with age?
This distance is like death and your smell has faded
from all the things you left behind: sweet musk stripped from
old t-shirts and pajama bottoms two sizes too big.
Strangers pass and I catch a scent--that same musk brings you
back just like that, a flash frame moment of my nose
close on your neck, breathing in.
