From My Journal - 1988

"I feel so alone for the first time in my life; like a has-been Nike swoosh, like a new kid at school, like a cream soda in the fridge, like a word stuck in a pen."

That was from my journal in 1988. If you're from the 80's, you will remember that for a while, Nike was huge and you had to have that swoosh on your shoes. But by '88, the craze was pretty well over, no one had thought of "just do it" yet and other tennies like Adidas and K Swiss had stolen the market, at least as far as a journal writer in St. Louis at the time was concerned. And I apparently wasn't too fond of cream soda.

I guess I was feeling alone at the time. I wrote my best poetry as a lonely teenager and as an in love teenager and as a hyper teenager and as a trying to win free stuff teenager and as a contemplative teenager....you get the point. My career as a poet hit it's peak right about the same time as my hormones did. Juvenescence makes a riotous muse if captured properly.

One of my favorites is called "Why Do Lovers Walk So Slow?"

Why do lovers walk so slow
Don't they know I've got to go
They walk so slow that I can't stand
To be behind those hand in hand.
The bells gonna ring
And I'll be late
Just because two people date.
I try not to be tardy to class,
But lovers walk slow...
And are hard to pass.

Technically, that is a sonnet, but not intentionally. It just sort of happened that way.