Respect

Respect from your peers, you gain more of it for following the norm and giving in to their pressure. Yet, you do what pleases you, you don't compromise any part of yourself, you show them respect for what they believe in, you don't force your own opinions upon them, and still you're shunned by them.

You just can't fucking win.

I was extremely distracted today. Sitting in my university's library, hoping to do work, but I felt the urge to go back to my poetry. Although, I had no inspiration. Until I looked up from my desk. Enjoy.

Work can be tiring.

The words begin to scramble.

Pages disperse.

Thoughts are lost,

The mind is distracted.

Eyes peer across

To find a smile - contagious.

A visage worth praise.

Eyes that pierce

Yet skin so soft.

Lips that pout,

So effortlessly.

Calm waves of the sea

Running down her hair.

A look of innocence;

Although one of experience.

A foreign beauty,

Unexpectedly motivational. 

Looking back at some of my older work, I found a piece that was written by someone else, hidden away amongst my shit. I kept it a secret, I hid it from from my partner because it was a poem I felt deeply about, but it was meant for another, my muse. I do not know who originally wrote it, but I would like to share it.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
Or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
In secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
But carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
Thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
Risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way
Than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
So close that your eyes shut as I fall asleep.

I have recently found my favourite description of what narrative poetry means. Its in the introduction to 'A Book of Narrative Verse', compiled by V.H. Collins, with the introduction written by Edmund Blunden. I thought I would just share it's wisdom:

"A good narrative poem is a long strain of music accompanying a designed movement of human lives and passions, various in volume, in harmony, in time; its charm is not quite that of drama, with its stir and grasp and interrogation, nor of the novel, vigorous in direct action and multitudinous in characters and conversations. It is romance in closet relation to the ways of existence, and asking no strange, sudden transcendings of the imagination. The lyric and the ballad (so far as we may use these or any terms with a sense of limits) require of us an immediate syblimity."