My 2nd Love Poem Part 2

If you haven’t checked out my last post yet, do so. In that post, I briefly explained the background of the poem in which I was writing it. Today, however, I want to go further in-depth, and then perhaps maybe get into a theoretical aspect of writing poetry.

One thing I want to first note off is that for this poem, unlike any others I have written, is that I actually get quite literal. In my first line, I say “she’s looking at me”, then later on I continue on with “Her head turned/ From the corner of her eyes”, and soon I have another “Her eyes scan over me,”, and I end the poem with a “And I solemnly realize/Even if she does like me and even if I like her back/We will never be together.” All of these are literal descriptions of what I saw from her while I was writing this poem or what I was thinking.

The second big difference is that I did not attempt to put any fancy smancy literary devices like I usually do. For those who have read my past poems before, you might have noticed a ton of symbolism in those poems. I actually made an effort to put those in, because I had a belief that symbolism was the ultimate essential piece of literature and was what made things beautiful. I HAD that belief. As you can see in this poem, I made no attempt. I just wrote what I automatically felt.

So what made me shift from symbolic to more literal? Music. Nowadays, there is the general gist that contemporary music is not deep, that it is dirty, that it is just people singing and rapping out shit. And as a child, I totally agreed with that. I barely saw any symbolism or any of that stuff in say, Ariana Grande’s music. Her songs oftentimes are just a repetition of  the words “I love you” in various forms.

Take this sample from Ariana’s “Right There”-

You know what I need (aye)/I know what you like, (aye)/Put it all together baby/We could be alright (hey)/How could this be wrong/When it feels so right/Yeah, I really love you/I really love you (oh)
And I’ll never let you go…

Here, the lyrics are seriously just like literal talking, and I don’t see any artsy kind of stuff. There’s no symbolism I see or any literary devices I see. Yet guess what? I still like the song.

And why is this? Because sometimes people don’t get your symbolism the way you see it. The saying “as big as a rhino” can be perceived differently. I might see it mostly in terms of size, while another guy might see it mostly in terms of roughness, etc. Sometimes, people don’t even catch it or get it at all. But with literal words like “I love you,” people understand what one is talking about.

Another good thing about being literal is that people can relate to it more. Whereas symbolism and literary devices seem to be relegated to poets, authors, and literary artists, being literal is what people do in everyday life. Therefore, people understand it more. When a guy asks a girl out, he usually doesn’t say, ” Will you float with me above the clouds and bathe with me in water?” etc. He will simply say. ” Will you go out with me?”

And then this concept of writing poetry without thinking but just feeling. Just doing so, I feel it captures the emotion more- the way my heart leaped and the way I felt scared when she looked at me. Whereas if I had thought too much about how to incorporate symbols and other stuff, I would have gotten lost in the thought and forget about the initial feeling that propelled me to write the poem. This is perhaps a new concept that I would have to explore more.

But overall, I realize that today’s music is not less deep. Just more relatable.  Yet, I believe the best way is to achieve a balance between this literal-ness and symbolic-ness. In my next post, I will shift away from art and move into something more science-related.

My 2nd Love Poem Part 1

So, I have this sneaking suspicion this girl from a class of mine likes me or is interested in me, and as the summer passes, it’s getting more and more obvious. Even my female friends based on the hints have told me she does. But today, the signs were too obvious, and it made me feel something uneasy. And just like that, I started writing while ignoring my teacher teaching. Below is the poem, and in my next post, I will talk about what I did different in this poem from any other poem I wrote and go more in-depth.

A Girl Who Likes Me

She’s looking at me

Giving me glances, like

Light feet tapping the water,

Prancing along

Footprints embedded on my heart.

The way she looks at me

Her head turned

From the corner of her eyes

I am the prey

She the lioness

I feel violated, breached, trespassed

Me overturned, lying on my shell

Underbelly exposed

Her eyes scan over me.

When our eyes meet, she quickly looks away.

………….

But at the same time,

My heart dances, jitters,

Leaps, yelps,

Smiles, giggles,

With a little skip

Why, she likes me!

But then a roadblock—I stop.

I look up at the cloudy sky,

And I solemnly realize

Even if she does like me and even if I like her back,

We will never be together.

A Love Poem I Wrote

So recently I have been caught up in some love…….thus explaining why I haven’t blogged for some time. So I have decided to put an end to my love craze for this particular girl. Instead of saying simply “I like you” however, I decided to write a love poem. A really depressing one, because I know that it won’t end well. Nevertheless, I’m amazed at the pathetic piece of literature I created. The meaning of the poem I will leave it up to the reader to decide.

The Gold I Found                      by Titus Wu

Once upon a morning,
A man with a shovel wandered.
Upon a black hill he stood,
A hill barren and lifeless.

Hopeless and disappointed,
He stuck his shovel into the soil,
Expecting nothing
But dirt.

But a clunk he heard,
And there yonder he saw gold.

Gold, beautiful beyond measure,
Angelic beyond angels,
Gold that showered rays of light everywhere,
Turning the hill from pitch black to warm green.

Happy and delighted,
He dug for more.
And he found more.
And the more he found, the more he dug.

But pity the man when his mind
Is consumed with gold.
Obsessed, that he dug too deep
And found himself trapped
In the very hole he created.

Like a bug trapped in a jar,
Like a prisoner in a dark cell,
He tried to climb back out.
But with every attempt he failed,
With every attempt he fell back in,
Falling deeper into distress.

Every new idea, every new attempt
Into getting him back out
Only failed and made him fall deeper.

He became a madman,
Isolated, lonely, depressed,
A child suffocating in poison gas.
For the love that he felt for gold,
Gold never gave back.

He died later one day,
In a cold night.
But the gold was still there.
And his love for it remained.

A Poem of Guilty Conscience

Here was a poem I wrote comparing how I felt when I lied to the experience of a man jumping off a helicopter. In my next post, I will talk about the essence and nature of lies, or the question of why we lie.

I have told my parents a horrible lie and my conscious has weighted me down.

Like a man who doesn’t know how to swim that is high up in the sky,

Initially safe in the comforts of his helicopter,

So was my heart, guilty free of the problems of the sea, high in spirits.

But soon these spirits were gone and problems arose,

Just as the man is pushed off the helicopter and kicked out into sea.

Down the man plummets, landing flat-faced into the sea,

Down my heart goes, shattered at the landing.

The man tries to inflate his life jacket,

thinking he will not have to bother with his inability to swim,

So did I try to ignore my lie, thinking no problems would arise from it.

But the life jacket fails and the man is submerged, unable to breathe,

Just as my heart cannot breathe free of the clutter of problems that surround my lie.

He makes his final struggle but the body goes limp.

The man dies and his body sinks lower and lower into the deep dark sea,

As did my good spirit pass away

And fall lower and lower into shameful depths of immorality.

This poem I wrote was actually originally for an epic simile assignment from my English class. Apparently, I didn’t think this was good enough so I turned another one in. So what is an epic simile? An epic simile is not a simile that is so epic. Although that definition would be pretty funny. Rather, it is a relatively long simile that can go in two ways. One way is to compare an extraordinary experience with something commonplace, so that way the reader understands this experience. For instance, by comparing a god flying through the air with a dove flying, the reader can get a visual for how gods fly. The second way is to make something seem much grander or more dramatic by comparing something commonplace with something unordinary. For instance, in my poem, I compared lying, something everybody has been through, with a guy jumping off a helicopter into the ocean, something you definitely don’t see everyday. It in a sense makes my lying feel more devastating than it actually seems. Well, that’s your literary term for the day.

Around The Corner

Hello readers. Many times, in my daily life, I’m just a regular high school student, with no feeling whatsoever, just living my life. However, every once in a while, I would get extremely touched in the heart by something. And so it happened yesterday, in which I was really touched by this poem by Charles Hanson Towne, called “Around The Corner.” Check the cartoon from Zen Pencils (see my links page) below.

Perhaps if I was reading this poem with only the words, I would feel, yeah whatever. But the cartoon pictures really put emphasis and feeling into this poem. This poem (along with this cartoon) is something I will never want to forget.

Checkmate Poem

Today, I’m really bored, so I don’t know what to do for today’s post. I thought I’d like to reblog my first post (not that many views), which was basically a poem I made.

Checkmate by Titus Wu

It’s six o’ clock in the night,
I come and sit at an outdoor table.
I take out my chessboard, my chess pieces, my chess clock,
My valuable pencil and my esteemed mind.

He comes in a black cloak,
Old with age he carries a wooden stick,
But his mind is as young as ever.
Night wraps around him like a mother,
His face remains hidden and unknown.

He sits across from me,
Staring at me with ravenous eyes,
We shake hands but for only a moment.
The chess clock starts, and the game begins.

I open up the game with white,
He does the second move with black.
Back and forth we take turns moving pieces.
As more time passes,
The more I take advantage and the more I conquer.

I beam with the rays of Helios,
My chest puffed up and my eyebrows raised.
But he smiles a sly grin,
A grin that I do not understand,
A grin that perhaps my experiences will never reach.

As the night gets unavoidably darker and darker,
The more difficult it is for me to see the chess pieces.
While I have to rely on my feeble sense of touch,
His sharp eyes still see clearly.
In darkness he is brighter and ever nearer.

It is midgame, and I am losing.
Fear grips my heart strongly
As he forces me to give way and let him dominate.
Just as the day always gives in to night,
So does my pride give in to humiliation.
I now know why he grinned.

I feel sad in knowing
That I am losing at my favorite game
My passion and love in life.
But I also know that
Not even the greatest chess player in the world
Can beat him, the great one.

Endgame comes and arrives,
I am only left with a few pawns and one downtrodden king.
The chess clock is slowly nearing to a stop.
We quickly make our final moves,
I knowing that I have no chance of winning.
The last move he puts his mighty queen at d4.
Alas, that fateful square!

At first, I do not realize.
I look up at him and see him smile that same sly grin.
He holds out his hand for the final eternal handshake.
Checkmate.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

I said in my last post that I would try to express other opinions that Shakespeare had on love. However, I found that this Youtube video did a better job of it:

Well, hope ya’ll had a happy President’s Day!

Shakespeare’s Love Letter

Happy post- post-Valentine’s day! For today, I will continue the series on the philosophy of love. One of the many things that we think of when we hear about love and Valentines is love letters. Nowadays, love letters are not that common. What a modern person usually does today is send a love tweet and that kind of sort. Um, seriously? Where is the love there? All I see is some boring c–p. Unfortunately  it seems as if love letters are becoming endangered.

I don’t know why this is happening; I mean, when one reads a love letter, one gets a sense of love just looking at the handwriting and smelling the aroma of a letter. When one writes a love letter, one usually has to put some thought into the writing and effort into the decorating. And it just seems so emotional and beautiful. I even remember a teacher who actually spend a whole class time just talking about how it felt like to receive a love letter.

Perhaps one of the most beautiful love letters I have seen is from Shakespeare. Well, it’s not exactly a love letter, but it would definitely look wonderful as a love letter. If I was a girl receiving this letter, you bet that I would go galloping straight towards Shakespeare and ask him to marry me. Check out his love sonnet below:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

If you do not understand what is being said, then let me explain it to you. The first line obviously indicates that Shakespeare will be comparing his love to a summer’s day. However, as we all know, sometimes summers can be not that much of a good day. Sometimes, the summer can get really hot; however, in line two, Shakespeare says that his love is “more temperate” than summer. In other words, his love will always be just right. From lines 3 to 8, Shakespeare lists out the bad things about summer; he does this so as to contrast this against the superior qualities of his love later on. For instance, in line 4, summer “has all too short a date,” or in other words, the summer sometimes feels too short. This contrasts against line 9, in which the love’s “eternal summer shall not fade.”

But perhaps the most beautiful part about this sonnet are the last three lines. In line 12, what do you think “lines” mean? At first, I thought it was referring to the wrinkles on one’s face when one grows old. However, after a bit more analyzing, I realized that the lines actually refer to these actual lines of this sonnet. So basically, line 12 means that as his love grows among these lines, and in line 13- and as long as men are able to live and read this sonnet, line 14- this love that exists between Shakespeare and his lover will always live. In other words, Shakespeare’s love is embedded into this sonnet, and whoever reads this sonnet will always know of this love.

This perhaps ties into the view of love that love is eternal. Shakespeare must have believed it; what he wrote in the last three lines was basically saying that even after he died, his love will still exist. Love can never be broken, even after death. Christians also believe this, for they believe “love is God,” and if God is eternal, then so is love. And even if I wasn’t a Christian, I would still believe this, too. Love is a powerful force that will always exist. No matter how many tribulations, love will always exist, whether it is love for a child, a friend, a teacher, or a parent. My grandmother died, but I still love her to this very day.

Of course, Shakespeare didn’t just believe love was eternal. He also had much more other opinions, which will lead us into the next post.

My Very First Post!

Hi guys. This is my first post on this website. For now, just check around to see what I’ve done so far (which is not really anything). I will being doing daily posts. For today, just check out this poem that I created. Called Checkmate (download Checkmate poem). For tomorrow’s post, I will provide more insight on this poem.

Chess pieces