Tortured Poetry of the Early Aughts
I can't even believe I'm showing you this.
The other day, I was doing more Zach Bryan Poasting, as I’ve been wont to do lately.
Just be glad if you’re not my Facebook friend — it happens way more often over there.
Look, I don’t really “hate” poetry. I appreciate poetry, but I don’t really like it. I don’t enjoy the meandering words that are often nonsensical to anyone but the poet (whether readers admit it or not), and I no longer enjoy deriving my own meaning from others’ works. I am more likely these days to want to know why they said what they said. I’m less interested now in me, because I feel like I know me better now, much better than I used to know myself, and I feel confident that I now know how to keep getting to know myself. But other people? I’ll take any chance I can get, most of the time. I want to know other people. If I have to have it in my life, I much prefer my poetry set to beats and rapped into a microphone.
I’d (probably) rather read your memoir — or even listen to your SoundCloud rap track — than read your poetry. If you’re my friend, I’ll buy your poetry book to support you, though. I have done that… a lot. I guess I know a lot of poets. I’m sorry that I am tearing to shreds your craft, poet friends.
…That said (of course I was going to say that), I have an admission to make, as Poetry-Hater that I am: I used to write a metric fuck ton of melodramatic, navel-gazing poetry, constantly. I wanted to publish it. I thought it was one of the things I believed to be my many callings. I thought I was a skilled rhymer in middle school and high school with my 4-line verses or whatever (I have no vocabulary for poetry for what I hope by now are obvious reasons), then I thought I was so creative and edgy later when I learned that rhyming wasn’t strictly necessary and basically anything goes. Then I went to art school. I was dark and felt tortured and misunderstood (of course I did) and talked about things like happily dropping dead at concerts and slicing my own skin open and drowning.
I stopped writing poetry sometime around 2008. I know the year because I had just broken up with a poet. I never really gave the reason why I stopped much thought, and maybe his negative influence on my life at the time made me subconsciously averse to creatively expressing myself in that manner. That was also a time period of my life when I tore to shreds the majority of my Drawing I portfolio from art school in a drunken mess of a night when I felt such self-loathing and disappointment for not having finished that goal. I drank a lot then and was generally very unhealthy in every conceivable way.
I was, as you may not be surprised to hear by this point, listening to Zach Bryan the other day when a certain set of lyrics from a poem he was reading, “Lucky Enough,” stuck out to me:
The love I have will always be something my friends yearn
My memories were never cheap and never easy earned
I hope to choke on Jack and Coke in a bar during a northern winter
On a night the band was tight and right as rooftop lights flicker
I was shocked to hear those words: “I hope to choke on a Jack and Coke in a bar during a northern winter on a night the band was tight and right as rooftop lights flicker.”
What I wrote back then was so similar. I can’t fucking find it right now, of course, but it was long, detailed, and appropriately emo as fuck. I found something else I wrote a few years later about that time period in my life in my Google Docs, though, from 2008:
Now, I've historically had what most people call Bad Taste In Music. Throughout my high school years, I listened to such gems as N*Sync, Matchbox Twenty, and Savage Garden. Matchbox Twenty was an exceptional obsession that I didn't shake until around age 20 or so. My husband claims to lose all sexual attraction to me when I mention this.
But seriously, though. During those post-high-school years when I wasn't going to college and wanted a new avenue through which to "find myself" or whatever, I gravitated toward anyone I deemed appropriately "alternative," relative to my experience at the time, which consisted of a laughably tiny segment of people ("not preppy? Let's be friends!").
Shortly after high school, through the job I had at a one-hour photo lab, I became friends with a group of people who liked to drink vast amounts of liquor several nights a week while listening to Flogging Molly and Rancid. I quickly deemed myself a Punk Rock Fan, dyed my hair black, and got a tattoo.
After my brief stint of hanging out with these people (and gaining my first painful experience in a mosh pit), I made some new friends who also liked to drink heavily, only they listened to Dave Matthews Band and Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers while getting stoned and playing Rummy. These particular bands were more up my alley than the "look at me, I'm trying to fit into a trendy subculture!" pseudo-punk rockers like Rancid and Flogging Molly. I didn't need a new wardrobe to like these bands, so I dressed in jeans and t-shirts and drove my car around the neighborhood, chain-smoking menthol American Spirits while listening to “Dancing Nancies” on repeat, lamenting over the fact that I was about to turn 20 and still didn't know what I was going to do with my life.
Music to me at that time felt so necessary. I needed a song to narrate every moment of my life. It was only a year later that I began my epic iTunes seasonal playlists, which I would add to throughout the year. There was a playlist for every small era of my life, which I would eventually reminisce through during periods of that self-indulgent melancholy, usually accompanied by bad poetry, inspired by two bottles of wine or several beers, consumed entirely alone in my bedroom at my mom's house, room lit only by the glow of my trusty little iMac from the era where they looked like that Pixar lamp. Sounds depressing, I'm sure; I assure you, though, I was having the time of my life. Nothing felt better to me then than sitting alone, drunk or on my way there, listening to music and writing embarrassingly personal posts on my LiveJournal, detailing exactly what was wrong with my job, my friends, my hair, my dating experiences, life in general.
The last paragraph has become true again. The music has changed, updated a little, and I don’t drink alcohol while I sit there and listen to it anymore; I sit on a meditation cushion on the floor, or at my desk, in my dimly-lit office/craft room and smoke weed while I get into my feels. And instead of LiveJournal, well, here I am on Substack.
I thought I was promising to show you some cringe poetry from the early-aughts, but since I can’t find it (yet! I have approximately 300 more diaries and online journals to comb through), I’ll post this other one, instead. For accountability or something.
It used to take a long time for me to fall asleep
When I'd go to my grandma's house
In the country
Not like the street
I was used to
A nice place, don't get me wrong
it's not the hood
But a lot of friends whose worried moms
Moved them to the suburbs,
They had a different idea of "good"
Sirens sung me to sleep but I wasn't afraid of the street.
I liked to walk
I wouldn't say I was
necessarily
enthusiastic about it but I was a kid, a lazy sort of kid, an impatient kind of kid
To walk was to not wait.
I liked to walk
I wouldn't say I was
necessarily
enthusiastic about it but I was a kid, a lazy sort of kid, an impatient kind of kid
To walk was to not wait.
You know, the world might have lost something by your giving up poetry at that, but what I really regret is the loss of your destroyed drawings