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Last week, my plan was to write a brief piece about “Funk Backwards,” a collection of six poems I recently rediscovered that I wrote when I was eight years old.
I should’ve known better.
Instead, my brain roped me into a meditation about youthful conviction and creativity, which quickly became an essay about Friedrich Nietzsche, the wisdom of the child, and to recalling the youthful wisdom we oh-so-serious adults so often forget.1
This week, I promise I’m keeping it simple.
Below you’ll find 6 poems I wrote circa 1996, AKA “Funk Backwards,” my first-and-only poetry collection published via my mom’s mid-90s printer, including the funky font, grammatical errors, warts and all; for those poems that particularly resonated with me, I’ve written a response poem that functions as a dialogue between my 8-year-old and 35-year-old self.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
trains are the surest place to clear my head.
Home is a happy place inside the heart, a room of one’s own where dreams play a part in the dance of existence and the spiral of play, like a dog waiting for a train, biting at flies on the quai.
It’s not the sunglasses that reveal the world in shade, but the eyes that filter the prism in search of light.
Eight billion of us and counting—does anyone know the number anymore?
Eight billion of us and counting,
all of us shades of light and dark.
We are all of us masters and slaves unto our own dialectics.
Listen to the wind if you don’t believe me. Reach for a different shelf at the bar. Level up. To plateau is human but to hang on is divine. Sometimes we peak like the child at the precipice of the next plane. Sometimes we peek like the child at what lies beyond.
The camel and the lion forever wallow in the depths of my belly,
and these neuronal explosions all play a part.
Am I my own beast of burden? Yes. But only because wisdom I will forever remain a beast.
My burdens are not always my own choosing, but they remain my responsibility.
So lay down on the sofa, child, and tell me about your mother and father.
No, I insist, I shan’t be reduced to either. They are not means to an end, though they’ve been here from the start.
A masterpiece is precisely what the boy once said:
it only becomes a master peace once revealed in the head.
Like the crunch beneath my feet of golden leaves in the fall, I jump into a pile of leaves and yawn at the enduring smell of smoke on the horizon.
The sky is purple like a plum.
The clouds are vanilla ice cream dotted with rain.
Somewhere in my memory it’s forever October 31, 1996,
and me and my twin brother are eating split pea soup at my mother’s dinner table.
My brother is dressed as a vampire and I as a beast.
Twenty eight years onwards—isn’t that a Saturn Return?—
we still celebrate the equinox and the people we are in between.
We wear costumes to return to the truth we once knew inside.
Is it any wonder Halloween is also a celebration of those who died?
The world is no longer a helper on its own.
The world is a wounded cormorant trying to stay aloft on a putrid breeze.
Yes, David Attenborough, there is still beauty to be found, but
is it tragedy or just reality that it’s usually witnessed in 4K?
A different version of the same question: why is it so hard to care?
I buy a single plastic bottle when I travel and use it thrice
and this means I’m part of the solution, right?
I tell myself yes as I board yet another train.
Maybe trains are the future because they used to be the past.
If humans stopped fucking for just 100 hundred years
wouldn’t the beauty of the world find a way to last?
But what about the child? And what about the rocks?
Some people must get their rocks off every single day. So be it.
Melting icecaps and digital feeds make lonely angry people.
What do they feed on?
The erosion of everything we’ve learned along the way.
The man in the First Class train carriage removes his shoes—
calloused feet—
whilst a tired-mother in the next carriage scrounges candy for her child to eat.
This is brilliant and some of your replies are just as evocative as your vision as a child - though I wish you’d addressed the eyeless disguised dogs, who intrigue me.
This is one I shall return to again and again. The promise shown at 8 spilling out into glorious words and beautiful thinking. Love it. "Sometimes we peak like the child at the precipice of the next plane. Sometimes we peek like the child at what lies beyond." Perfect!