(this is stream. I really wanted to post today but I made a point of staying up until 4ish to write the first thing to come to mind. funny enough parts of this are in my latest song. my friend's brother isn't doing too well. and my other friend is part of a broken family and broken home. life has become incredibly depressing when taking a closer look. i'll set my binoculars and magnifying glasses down for a while because the surface is jovial. at least most of them are. no comments necessary. if you have nothing to say or can't find the right way to say what you have to say, don't bother. it's alright.)
my mother
told me
i was
a stillborn.
i didn't
believe her.
she finally
confessed
that i'm
really just
an accident.
her motto
has always
been
"no regrets"
yet she
has assigned
this title
to me.
i am
the eldest
of four
children.
my father
speaks in
grunts.
the soundtrack
of our
lives is
the sound
of parents
arguing.
it was
then i
realized that
i was
never the
problem.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
That conclusion, I would think, would be rather relieving. It is a sad situation if seen as sad, no doubt, but for the individual it could be worse.
Thumbs up Mike!
I think this is really well-written Mike, and as sad as the piece is I really like it. As a reader though I don't like that we need to just accept that regret is a title assigned to the speaker, because maybe that's a false assumption, accident doesn't imply regret.
those are my thoughts, take em or leave em.
I really, really love this post. The first four stanzas really blew me away, the way it's so simply stated. Frank, but painful. And the way nothing is capitalized works really well too, not only because it is more childlike, but also because it makes the narrator's voice so much more subdued. I can feel the pain in every statement made, even the revelation at the end, as though even that realization was not enough to heal his heart.
I disagree with Emlyn's statement about "accident" not necessarily implying regret. The narrator's mother had always avoided the question and covered it up with white lies (quite impossible ones, too). I think that's a sign of regret, or at least guilt. In fact, that stanza about "no regrets" is the strongest, in my opinion, because it's so simple and yet says so much. You really get a glimpse into his mother's character and dilemma, and how the narrator feels about it, in one line.
My only complaint about this poem is that I'm not too fond of the two stanzas about speaking in grunts and the soundtrack of our lives. I found the wording cliché. However I did like how it zoomed out from a mother-child relationship to the mother-father, which reflects the epiphany at the end, and also how it zooms out on the timeline. Ironically, the moment he realizes it's not his fault "it was then" actually takes place over a lifetime.
Post a Comment