1995 — FOUR
Dear Courtney,
You are sitting there with
You’r bright gleamy glare
When you cry I hope I’m not
The reason for the trickle in
Your eye
Sometimes I cant feel but when
You talk your words of wisdom
Are always a healer.
I cant live knowing that
Shit in our heads is just
Emotions coming threw so
I decided to tell you
Iyou
Awe how emotional huh
Well its just for you
Baby are you loving it or what
Well I’m in math
gotta go
So catch you on the outside
Ok.
Cadence and I were the queens of bad teen poetry. I believe I could start an entire blog of just the volumes and volumes of depressingly awful “poetry” we created for each other in our blind youth. I don’t think it would be fair to ever impose that kind of literary vomit on the world though. Notes written by 14 year olds is bad enough, but I digress. She and I wrote poems about suicide, self-mutilation, unrequited love, bad acid trips, getting drunk and stoned, hating preppy kids and mean girls, and wanting all adults to die. We absolutely abhored our parents for bringing us into our self-diagnosed miserable lives. We never thought about the future, only the present, and because of that we were pretty hopeless and lost to sink in our own brew of winsome and melodramatic adolescent bullshit.
Our best work was our rhyming verse, and here ‘best’ should actually translate to “funniest in retrospect”. We would take entire 45 minute class sessions to pen self-indulgent poems made up of demented couplets, rhyming things like “fuck ass creep” with “hit by a jeep”, and “love me or not” with “sack of snot”.
Our other favorite literary device was the quote. We filled the pages of our homework planners with favorite words of wisdom rather than our assignments. One entire month of my planner was devoted to quotes from serial killers while the bulk of the rest was choice lyrics from bands like Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, Alice in Chains, Pantera, Suicidal Tendencies, Hole and Nine Inch Nails, etc.
Our key emotions during our eighth grade year were anger and sadness. We did not know the strength of the words ‘love’ or ‘hate’ because we had not fully experienced either of them, though that was not to our knowledge at the time. So we ended up either loving or hating everything; there was no in between for us then. Every emotion was intensified to full capacity and our only way to express it was with our severe lack of vocabulary on paper, and it was strictly for our eyes only. I can’t imagine what we would have gotten up to had the internet been around then. Looking back, I am so grateful it was not.
