Poetry... and Hipsters?

Hello All.

      I am going to break one of my own unofficial rules today. Generally, I write (as much as I can) like a neutral party. When I say neutral party, I mean that I try to make it so that the reader really doesn't have very many clues as to what my life is like, how old I am, or what I do. But today my post needs a bit of context, so I'm including the fact that I am a university student and not (gasp) either some high-school student or an aspiring author somewhere downtown in a gritty apartment who frequents coffee shops to use wi-fi and manic-depressively write out my life's story in an obvious place so that everyone can see how intellectual and deep I truly am. Ha! If this were true today, I'd probably be wearing those horribly obnoxious hipster glasses with the enormous black frames. And a beret. Because really, isn't that what everyone's picturing in their head right now? Though now I realize I'm doing a post on poetry--and bloody free verse at that--, so really, I'm sabotaging my own image, here.

       Just a side note--I've been writing so many formal academic essays for my classes that now it feels severely wrong to be writing "I" so many times. I'm very disheartened. I have also discovered that everything about university is meant to make you sound like a raging ponce. Every class has its own jargon, and every prof wants it enforced. By the end of my degree, I will have earned the right to make up words because hell, I have a degree! Who's going to question my whimsical syntax? Nobody questions the Professors out loud, even though we all know they make up new words about once every class. But we can't say shit because they have "Dr." in front of their names. I assure you, however, that I am with you when you call them out in your head.

      Anyway, I wanted to pause a moment to discuss the nature of taking several classes for the one subject. Eventually, some of your Professors are likely to discuss a common theorist, or subject. For example, as an English major, gender becomes a subject of analysis and debate in all of my classes. What the product of this becomes is that eventually, in one day you'll have this massive connection/epiphany, as all of lessons from class will combine and you'll view the world in a whole new way. At least, that much is true for me.

      In between massive essays, I scribbled down a few lines. It didn't sound like a proper paragraph, so in a moment of laziness I hit enter at the end of every section of a thought, and voila. A poem. Now, I'm going to tell you now that normally I hate free verse. It bothers me that they usually doesn't rhyme. It's much easier to analyze meter and to me, it just plain sounds better. Don't get my wrong, I don't hate all free verse, but it needs to be really incredible for me to love it. Now I've discovered a reason for writing in free verse rather than prose narrative, or just a paragraph. Sometimes you can't express something in sentences, sometimes you need the line breaks, the white space to break up your thoughts. So that they can be read the way they're meant to be, and not just how standard writing dictates they should. This is what I ended up with.

 No One

I am proud to be a woman,

but if that means I am defined by the things

I can and cannot achieve, then I am not.

I am comfortable with my race,

but if that means I cannot love others

as much as I love myself, I am not.

I am secure in my sexuality,

but if that means who I can or cannot love

is restricted to one gender, the other, or both, I am not.

Why does the culmination of who I am

Depend on labels?

My love of pink? Girly.

My decision not to wear make-up? I’m frumpy.

If you don’t care whether I am straight or not,

Why is it you need to know?

I love words, but sometimes they fail me.

No sooner have we broken one layer of understanding,

Then we slap a strip of yellow caution tape on the next.

I dream of a world in which no gender

Decides how you interact with me.

Where no colour

Defines who I am.

Where no love

Is unjust or wrong.

I dream of a world in which life is a song

With no lyrics,

Because it has none of the things

That can halt a dream.

In this song, I am not.

We are.

      A masterpiece? Hardly. A piece of me? Definitely. Again, not really sure what motivated me to write it, it's just what happened. My next poem will rhyme. I'm sure of it. 

Till next time,

Chloe.

P.s: Yeah. I use sentence fragments a lot. I'm also en English major. Deal with the conundrum! Guess what? I also make comma splice errors frequently! And no, I wasn't even aware of what those are until this year. I admit it. I think we should all take this opportunity to admit that there are words we pretend that we understand because we feel like we should know what they are at this point in our lives. When people mention them we all just nod like we know what they're talking about, but really, we never end up looking it up later.