My Teenage Poems Are Unbearable and Precious
The rhymes are criminal, and I will defend them with my life.
At fourteen I rhymed "despair" with "nobody's there" and considered myself dangerous. I know this because the evidence surfaced last month, in a shoebox my mother handed over during her annual purge with the words, "Take your property, I am not running a museum."
Inside the box: three diaries. One purple with a broken lock, one with Kurt Cobain on the cover, and one that says MATHS NOTES in my own handwriting, which was a security system, because no one in my family had ever once opened anything labelled maths.
I sat on my bed and read all three in one evening, the way you press a bruise.
Reader, they are terrible.
I need you to understand the scale of this. These are not charmingly rough early works. These are poems in which the moon is "a lonely coin," and also, four pages later, "a cold white eye," and also, in a bold move toward the end of the purple diary, "a lonely coin" again... because apparently I plagiarized myself at fourteen.
There is a poem called "Why" that consists of the word why eleven times and then the word rain. There is a breakup poem about a relationship that lasted, by my own diary's dated account, from a Tuesday to a Friday. The poem describes this as "our years together." There is an ode to a boy named A. that rhymes "his eyes" with "my demise," and I want it on the record that A. did not know my name, and that this fact appears nowhere in the poem, which treats our love as settled law.
I read the worst ones aloud to my husband, who laughed so hard at "my soul is a cupboard nobody opens" that he had to leave the room and drink water in the kitchen like a horse.
And yet... Here is the thing I keep trying to explain to him, to myself, to the shoebox.
Somewhere around the twentieth poem, the laughing stopped working on me.
Because I remembered her.
The girl writing in the MATHS NOTES diary at two in the morning under a blanket, holding a torch in her teeth, absolutely certain that what she felt was too large for the house she lived in. She had no craft. She had no restraint. She had never heard the advice that you should show and not tell, so she told, at volume, in gel pen, sometimes in three colors of gel pen when the feeling escalated.
She meant every word.
That is the unbearable part and the precious part, and they are the same part.
My teenage poems are unbearable the way baby photographs are unbearable: blurry, undignified, and the only proof I have that I was ever that new.
Adults write with the brakes on. We revise, we hedge, we make the moon do something original or we cut the moon entirely, because the workshop said the moon is over. I once spent forty minutes deciding whether a comma made me look naive.
The girl with the torch in her teeth never once considered how she looked. She had a feeling at 1:47 a.m. and by 2:03 it was literature, and she slept the sleep of the published.
I read an essay recently about why safe poems lose, and I kept thinking that nobody had to teach her that. She was born unsafe. It took fifteen years of good taste to make me a coward.
Here is where I have to confess the turn this evening took, because around eleven o'clock the shoebox stopped being funny altogether.
Near the end of the Kurt Cobain diary there is a poem dated the sixth of March. I did not need the diary to know that date... It is the week my grandfather died, the one who taught me rummy and let me win exactly half the time, which is harder than letting someone win always. I braced myself for the melodrama, the demises, the cupboards of the soul.
It is eight lines. It does not rhyme.
It is about his spectacles, which sat folded on the newspaper for eleven days after the funeral because nobody in the house could be the one to move them. The last line says, "the crossword is still half done and I know two of the answers."
I sat with the diary on my knees and cried like the fourteen-year-old who wrote it, which felt fair, since she did the work.
That is the thing the criminal rhymes were doing all along, and I could not see it until now. All those moons, all those demises, every "Why" with its eleven whys: that was a girl doing scales.
Nobody starts with the real song... You rhyme despair with nobody's there four hundred times, and then one Tuesday grief walks into the house and takes off its shoes, and it turns out your hands know what to do, because they have been practicing on nonsense the whole time.
The bad poems were not the opposite of the good poem. They were its tuition.
So no, I will not be burning the diaries, and I have informed my husband that if he quotes the cupboard line at parties, the marriage will be reviewed.
Instead I did something the girl with the torch would have found unthinkable and also, I suspect, thrilling. I typed up the poem about A., the demise one, spelling errors intact, and posted it on a community wall for poets with a note that said, roughly, I was fourteen, I regret nothing, show me yours.
By morning there were strangers in the replies confessing their own teenage crimes. A man in his sixties posted four lines he wrote in 1974 comparing his heart to a transistor radio. A woman shared a poem that rhymed "eternity" with "chemistry," written for her lab partner. The comments read like a support group and a talent show at once, and I felt weirdly proud of all of us, this secret nation of former melodramatic children.
Because that is what we are, the ones who still write. We are just the teenagers who never fully quit. Everything I have written about memory since, every careful adult line, is standing on a landfill of lonely coins, and the landfill is holding.
Late that night I did one more thing. On the last page of the MATHS NOTES diary, under the final poem, in my current handwriting, which has not improved as much as you would hope, I wrote her a note. It says: "You were right about almost nothing. The moon is fine. A. is bald now. But you were right that it mattered. Keep going. Signed, nobody's there."
Then I put the diaries back in the shoebox, and the shoebox on the shelf where guests can see it, between the dictionary and the wedding album, which is exactly where it ranks.
The lock on the purple one is still broken. I like that now. It was never keeping anyone out anyway. It was keeping something in, and I am pleased to report, from the far side of everything, that it failed.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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