Occasionally I’ll have the intention to write something about a particular subject for several hours, only to finally get around to actually sitting down to type out my thoughts and have the entire thing come undone on me. Tonight was one of those nights.

Looking for some inspiration, I started rooting through old notebooks. I found several old term papers, including two I’m still proud of to this day, one on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the other on Taylor Caldwell’s Captains and the Kings.

The Caldwell paper is one of my finest for many reasons. For quite a while I was in the Heavyweight class of procrastinators, willing to put off nearly any project until a night or two before it was due. I recall several different occasions which found me firmly planted in front of the ancient Macintosh SE, jamming out well-routed stream of consciousness papers, a pot of extremely strong black coffee on one side, and a stack of books on another.

This was entirely the case with my Caldwell project. For my final in an American Literature class, I decided to compare the Armagh dynasty of Captains and the Kings with the Kennedy family, documenting all the similarities between them (there are many) and spouting off on the related curses.

I absolutely hate documenting research in the format perpetuated by the MLA Handbook, having grown up using the Chicago Manual of Style/Turabian. Most of the time, if I’d gotten my thoughts and sources down cold prior to writing the paper, it would actually take me longer to go through and put everything into the MLA style. I’m a footnote kinda guy, and it really bends my whistle when I’m told I can’t use them.

Anyway, I also found my old high school Creative Writing notebook, along with my entire portfolio for AP Composition. Leafing through things was very much the same as doing a minor archaeological dig of the Triassic period of my personality. If you’re really wondering, I’m in the Cretaceous now.

I also found a free verse chestnut from the very first English class I had in high school, and likely one of my first poems ever. I’ll share with you:

Companion

Your chocolate-brown eyes penetrate my icy-grey ones,

I pat your side, you snuggle closer to me.

You never speak to me.

You don’t have to, you can talk with your eyes,

we have a perfect understanding of each other.

I look at you and I can tell you feel the same way I do.

Sitting here on this soft, lush, sofa, we hold each other tight

through the stormiest days.

The sun’s shadows moave around the room, but you never

leave my side.

We grow older, together but separate, each with our unspoken

feelings.

We do feel the same way, we just never say it.

Soon, the time comes when we must part. I take

a final look into your comforting, warm eyes searching for words

that don’t want to come.

This short time we’ve been together seems so long.

Finally, I say the words you’ve wanted to hear for so long,

words I’ve always wanted to say to you.

“Want to play ball, Effi?”

-to my favorite dachshund

So I’ve been doing a lot of compiling of previous writings lately. I’ve been moving through a notebook of poetry I started in about 1999 or so, pulling out what still seemed relevant (or good) to me. It’s a pretty interesting process, reading something you wrote so long ago, under such different circumstances.

There’s a lot of emotion in each one of those poems, good or not, and that is something I’m rather proud of. Art should be as messy (meaning emotionally challenging) as life itself is, and reading what I wrote then has conjured up a lot of memories from that time, things I’d willfully forgotten about but came flooding back at each turn of the page.

What I’m not so happy with is how misguided that emotion was at the time. Then again, the late 90’s weren’t exactly a particular high point in my life.

I’m going to be collecting the good ones together in a new notebook. I’ve got a few other notebooks with poems in them, too, from various Creative Writing classes and seminars I went to, and if any of them make the cut, into the notebook they’ll go. Some of them will find their way here relatively soon, though I’m rather hesitant to put them out there on the Web without proper rights, etc. Still, I’d like to share them with you.

I’ll just warn you now, I never felt poetry was my strongest suit as a writer.