What My Eyes See

 The fuck did I just read?

Poetry is not my forte. I won't mince words about that. I went through the "angsty teen" stage where I wrote poetry (for lack of a better word). It was childish, poorly constructed, and full of bad mixed metaphors. My friends said it was good. My (soon-to-be) wife loved them. Me? I've never been happy about the works from that period of my life.

In truth, the little book with my attempts at poetry have been in the bottom of a box for years, only seeing the light of day when we packed to move. The LAST thing I want to do is open one of those and relive the acute embarrassment they cause, like the memory of that time in fifth grade when I sneezed while laughing in the lunchroom and blew long, stringy ropes of mucus into my cupped hands.

Which is a story for another day.

All of that poetry rhymed, at first. I knew then that poems came in all forms: free-verse, haikus (*shudder*), limericks, sonnets, couplets, triplets, en passant, Capulets, monoliths, etc. (I may have confused some of these.) But, in my mind, poetry rhymed. I branched out, and later entries were more free-verse.

What I'm trying to say is, my poetry sucks.

I haven't even attempted to write a poem for years, possibly a decade. Even when it fit the personality of a character in one of my stories. Hell, lets be honest, most times I just don't GET poetry. I can visualize through prose. Most poems leave me lost. There are exceptions, such as Robert Frost, Longfellow, and Sylvia Plath. But their verse seems more straightforward to me. In a Creative Writing class in college, our instructor told us that the best poetry was simply prose broken up in irregular segments to emphasize key elements.

All that having been said, I felt a poem forming in my head earlier tonight. I just finished The Bell Jar, one of many wonderful books I picked up for a song at the Colby Library's book sale this Summer. It was my first introduction to Plath. After the story's end, there was a biography that included several of her poems. These drove me to look up more of her work online. (I love the internet!)

Now I suffer from that bane of the writer: an idea that won't shut the fuck up. So, here's my first attempt at poetry since Clinton left office. If you survived my self-indulgent rant above, this might be the thing that causes your aneurysm. Don't say you haven't been warned...



Only see what my eyes see
no matter what lies before
those things life intends for me
Only see what my eyes see.

Birds, bees, autumn leaves
disappear in a stiff breeze
and the sky opens up to breathe
Only see what my eyes see.

Gathered wisdom of learned men
so many words bound by pen.
Only see what my eyes see
despite the world around me.

Am I blind, devoid of sense,
bitter rage or innocence,
the whites are black, the iris bleached.
Only see what my eyes see.


Daniel P. Coffman