Phoenix Poetry…
About a year ago I was taking a literature class with the University of Phoenix. It was total horse shit. One of my assignments was to write a free verse poem about who I am. Under the influence of Maker’s Mark and the Country music supergroup, The Highwaymen, I wrote this terrible piece of blasphemy.
“I AM”
The prophets said my parents were Adam
and Eve.
A man made of mud
pies and a woman made from
a pilfered rib.
The biologists said my father was a primate
and my mother was a protozoan
(a paramecium, perhaps).
The Bodhisattva
said Selfish
Desire and Longing
were my
mother and father.
I am their Son, Suffering.
The Earth said she was my mother.
She and my father, Time, conceived me
in their imaginations
when they were both too young to be
parents. Luckily, I sprang
from the mud a full-grown man.
Am I Adam?
With his duty done, Time marched on
leaving Mother Earth a single parent.
The truth is,
I AM
none of these things.
I AM
neither mud nor monkey.
I AM
not a latchkey kid suffering from the desire to know my father, while my mother spins aimlessly through the cosmos.
I AM
the cosmos.
I AM
stardust
I AM
matter and energy
never being created nor destroyed
only changed.
I was not imagined by the world, I imagined her.
I AM
not the son of Time
I AM
TIMELESS.
I’ll always be around.
Jack D.
Not sure if I get the point of your poem, Cisco (if indeed there was one), but I think I’m officially addicted to the song “The Highwayman” now.
AC
Jack,
There was a point. I used the assignment as a way to comment on different views of creation and existence. The poem suggests that I am not created, I am creation itself. It says I have always been and always will be (sort of like the song). It contradicts and embraces most science and religion at the same time.