I was sitting at my desk the other night writing some poetry or in reality, trying to let the poetry write itself (God, that sounds so smug and sickening)...this night though, it was being lazy or had some kind of writer’s block or was at the corner bar...I gave up and had a few cold ones myself...during a break in the proceedings, for some reason I began thinking about what the first poem I ever wrote...I can’t be 100% sure, but the first one I remember was one that I did for a fourth grade class...and I’ve lived my life in fourth class ever since...I think we were studying Robert Frost or maybe that was just wishful thinking...I don’t remember, hell I can’t remember what I did yesterday...the poem we had to write, I don’t know, had to be sixteen or twenty lines or something...of course I had no idea of what to write but for some reason I came up with this...I don’t remember the whole poem but it went something like this:
I drink beer at the pier,
Whiskey makes me frisky,
Gin makes me sin,
I smoke when I drink Coke,
…and there were other similarly themed lines of ‘poetry’...I thought it was pretty funny and so did my friends...of course I was only 8 or 9 years old at the time...I have probably written worse things as an adult...I thought I’d get a failing grade on it but strangely enough, my teacher liked it and gave me an ‘A’...she must of been some kind of communist sympathizer, or a closet hippie...I don’t know if that inspired me to become a writer/poet, but it’s always nice to get some encouragement when you are young...
I was thinking of what might happen today if I wrote such a thing...maybe nothing at all, or in this age of overreaction, I’d get called down to the principal’s office and gotten grilled about it...my parents would of gotten their asses put before some social worker or by a Child Protection agency and have to explain why I would come up with such ideas...I’d probably even get suspended for being a bad influence...if so, it wouldn’t be the last time that happened...some psychologist might of read into it some suppressed feelings I was expressing or that somehow this was a first person account of actual events that I had accessed and processed and thusly I had regressed...of course that would have all been a bunch of bullshit, but that’s the kind of snowflakes that are running things now...it was just a silly poem but I wonder if today’s eyes would see it that way...we live in a fucked up world and it’s not because of goofy poems.
