Vagabond

Vagabond

Blue morning glories crept up the lines of her gate

Dawn rises but it's not her nature to accept her fate

Outlandish peals of laughter connect her close to the rain

Ended two years of confused love, bore her heart dependent to the pain

Questionably bound to pebble ridden roads

Inhabited white walls and a land where rain always flowed

Her drainpipes ran not clear with water but red with opaque wine

Drowned monarchy possessions kept her confined

Outside knowledge she's born fair from where she's suppose to be

Abandoned dealt home, dedicated soul to the changing sea

Crossed all conflicting thoughts and shallow mud puddles

Invented herself vagabond, hid from what would befuddle

Tears were brewing in the inky sky and finally left her stranded

She didn't know her or what was near the night now commanded

Dawn rises she recoils from the shock of light on the line

And the potential for everything to be in a define

Horrified of the orange quaking breaking the darkened static

All is idiosyncratic, but nothing is ever left enigmatic

The skin she wove unraveled dead to reveal anew

Her vagabond ways sashayed her the bird once more flew

Recordings of her life drowned in the waters of their meaning

Ragged gypsies who followed shook their coins demeaning

Trespassed lamps and canes of the cloaked undertaker

Fetched her to the troubled man laying perishing in the acre

The bark of boughs were thick and unyielding

He cried to the night watchman listening to the hour shielding

She bore his body to her new found home his psyche to construe

Satisfied enough to stare at his eyes of a tender and stubborn blue

He woke on a brass bed beneath patched blankets to see her wonder

Triggered and arose a romance of body and mind under lightening and thunder

In scarlet poppy spring both were left momentarily blind but soon to expire

Changed inevitably within one day to ensure no direction to Kintyre

He proudly to her "You don't have freedom unless you feel its beat"

She scolded "Definitions can never make you complete"

Continued she felt to speak "The copper that conquers drives them in herds"

His knowledge longer "Dreams can never be put to sleep yet poets write no words"

Their love persisting she through words and mind to inspire was drawn to him

Like a holiness drawn and entwined closely to a temptation of some sin

The silence that encompassed their cove quickly was to lead astray

By their lack of sincerity the flashing slaughterers will others' to decay

Dearth of human indulgence their reason of being cultivates a motive to stay

The earth dwelt in befalls a thirst for the novel they gave longingly at the open doorway

Neither could be tied down by the speed of the other's changes

Dawn rises when she wakes he was departed he left to estrange

No ink-spilt letter or button of his drenched coat to remember to forget him by

She clad herself in a coat that fell to her knees laid upon her head a beret her only ally

Out the door she left the key in the knob taking no things in her pockets or hands

She took only the whimsical change of self and the loving recall of that man's heartland

About Vagabond

This is first of the three long poems I wrote over the summer. Both the ideas and words in the poem are inspired by a variety of resources that I indulged myself in over the break. Most notable and influential, however, was Bob Dylan's song Visions of Johanna which contain the following lines:

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet ?

We sit here stranded, though we're all doin our best to deny it

And Louise holds a handfull of rain, tempting you to defy it

Lights flicker from the opposite loft

In this room the heat pipes just cough

The country music station plays soft

But there's nothing really nothing to turn off

Just Louise and her lover so entwined

And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind.

More than anything did this song persuade me to write this poem, which began as eight of the lines in the second stanza. Vagabond is primarily about a girl who has been out of love for two years and has felt oddly misplaced in her society which she can only describe as insipid. Her solution is to leave and abandon all of her possessions because she discovers one cannot be happy while held down by material things and the truest way of abandoning everything is to become a vagabond, a person whose only constant is change. In the second stanza, the girl has settled somewhat in a newfound home. Nevertheless she flees once again when she feels she is being kept down and her "mask" is falling. The stanza's "orange" refers to morning and how the girl feels night keeps all secrets while the day reveals. Through the second stanza the girl meets a weary boy in her travels who is much like her, a vagabond also. She takes him to her new home and nurses him back to health. Soon they begin a romance, but it is a clash of egos. In the end, both are ready to move on and only linger for each other. Ultimately, after the boy leaves, the girl is content with her situation. 

Summer: If You Can Call It a Break...

Junior year is more excruciating than I ever could have imagined. It has been shaving me down like a used pencil and beating me to a pulp, yet the pace at which I have been running is not close to slowing down in any measure. Even within the past summer, when times of the day and night intermixed and came close to utterly disappearing, my life was more hectic than it had ever previously been. Nights, perhaps too often, reached to hours that men and women would regularly wake to work. While the morning's sun never shone too bright to wake me until the early afternoon. Nevertheless, it was in these late hours that fed all rapturous and sorrowful ideas that flowed constantly out of the curls of my brain. With both paint, words, and thoughts, I crafted more numerously and rapidly than I have been capable of. Opinions and determinations strengthened, and art grew deeper and more surrealistic. Yet, impatience became a constant companion and instead of wasting my precious three months on writing long stories, poetry and song became my savior. I discovered the kings and jesters of literature and simultaneously buried myself deep into the fitful mind and fit my feet into the wandering heels of Arthur Rimbaud. I devoured troubadour songs of Bob Dylan, beatnik poetry such as that of Allen Ginsberg, and the horrific imagery of Edgar Allen Poe. With both the late hours piling leisurely up and with the drunken poetry of these writers I indulged myself in, I felt I was going mad with hallucinatory brilliance. Then, with great misfortune and grief upon my shoulders, did I return to school. I do not, however, criticize the act of going to school, nor do I attempt to diminish the teacher's process of learning. I do, though, fully blame myself for being artistically unable to create under scholarly circumstances. Over the course of the summer I wrote a total of thirty-nine poems that which I am proud of. But, since the start of the school year, I have only been able to complete a single poem and I find myself suffering to write another. When the end of the glorious summer ended, I had a complete knowledge of what was to come (or not to come), nonetheless I achieved no objective to save myself from this gruesome writer's block. Call me fatalistic.