This Is My Poetry

I wonder now why I didn't just call this whole thing "This Is My Poetry."  I have grown to look at this and understand it as one little corner of the internet that is all mine, that no one goes to - one where I can be completely honest with myself.  I like that a lot.  I can be honest, and explore the writing I like, love, and even hate.  I feel like I want it to stay this way.

Sometimes I feel like my references are too simple, my poems too plain to be worth much more consideration than one reading.  However, I see too many poems today by too many intelligent people become too intelligent for their own good.  If there is a message you wish to convey, to a simple audience, the simplest way to do it is the best way.  Smart writers, I feel, get bogged down too consistently in trying to exhibit their own cleverness; their own abilities.  When this happens, the tone, mood, message, climax, structure - everything about the poem is in jeopardy.  That is, unless, they are writing for a different audience.  If this is the case, then they can be as fearlessly arrogant as they wish.

My initial intention with this blog was to create a place where the world can restore poetry to an art form that is wonderful, beautiful, and still easily accessible and vital to everyone.  Of course those goals are a little lofty, considering how impossible it is for even the most powerful people in the world to get people to unite about the simplest of things...but this was my dream nevertheless.

Poetry has become too exclusive.  It has become a sanctity reserved for only those who think they are smart enough to use it.  It is the most upsetting thing about poetry today to me.

But let's forget all that for now.  This place is for me.  I will treat it that way.

So now, I will put up another poem, simple in its construction, but still poetically justified.


His One Night
by Matt Catania

A boy was born this night

My boy

With freedom in his eyes

Near wrecked

Ripped from his mother

Mottled with blood

Ready to ascend

his crystal stair.

You remember that night well

The celestial ocean split apart

wave upon wave rushing aside

to open the universe

I left the ward

went outside

to call to them

for him

Bursts of light reached across the sky -

- Such lights!

The stars burned with reckless abandon -

- A chorus of lights!

I called to them

cried for him

they carried his name

to where it burns forever:

you remember it well -

remember that night well

for Inside I found my woman alive

where tears shatter peace –

where free eyes

never see again

You remember it well

remember that night well

the night the heavens carried his name

my boy’s name

to where it burns forever…

in the heavens

and the heavens alone.