Shorthand for Nothing

This one is patterned on this poem by ee cummings. It is called Not A Cynic, which is kind of a thing.

Humanity, I hate you
because you laugh at misfortune
and your smiles are insincere.
I hate you because
you’re afraid,
and afraid of talking about being afraid.
I hate how you
never stay long
and don’t say goodbye.
I hate how you always remind me
how much I’ll miss you.
I hate that you
are cruel and sweet and sad and hilarious.
I hate your gentle caress
late at night,
chasing my fears away
and my worries
and all of my doubts. Humanity,
I love you.

This is probably my more successful patterned-on-another-poem poem. The other one is called Song of Myself, patterned on some random lines from the Whitman poem of the same name.

If my lovers suffocate me,
it is my own fault,
not hers,
not an accident of my creation
or upbringing,
but my fault for giving her
anything less than myself.

Listen.
If I am not I,
I am nothing,
whatever my intentions.
This is clear to me now:
I can be no other.
I hide nothing from
the searching eyes of the world.
If I sound another’s battlecry,
what is it but some barbaric yawp,
some shapeless noise
polluting the night?

I let the chilling wind
embrace me,
smiling as it stings my eyes,
freezes my flesh.
It is around me,
until ‘me’ is all there is,
my suffering, my triumph,
everything,
and I will not go quietly.

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Unlike the European explorers,
I cannot land my fleet at new worlds,
my holds laden with gifts,
and marvel at someone so different.
There are no new names
to give new wonders–
but there are no new wonders.
Everything is named and charted,
and not even by a man
desiring to find and name new things.
Even so,
I long for unfamiliar territory,
for a land to explore,
some new world to claim as home.

Sometimes I write poems about things that are historical. This one is about how much it bothers me that the new world was found by people who were mostly interested in new trade routes, and now I’m looking back at it and thinking that they were probably still just as excited to find this completely new world. Even so: the world is pretty much charted now, and sometimes that’s sad.

I’m not so keen on subjugating the natives and killing them with my diseases, but that’s not the point.

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