In my junior year of college, I wore my favorite pair of hip-hugger bell bottoms—soft denim, salmon in color—with an orange sad face patch on the right back pocket. The patch was my protest not against the Vietnam War that raged at that time, but against optimism, unbridled happiness, and the belief that people could harbor a “sunny disposition.” Instead, I chose a patch to reflect who I was then—a skeptical, pessimistic, and often sad person who preferred sunset to sunrise, twilight to dawn, reality to naiveté.
Forty-five years later, I feel the need to explain to young, optimistic high schoolers why I don’t write “happy poems.” My only explanation is that when those moments or hours of sheer joy enter our lives, we live them. We don’t think about them. We don’t analyze them. We don’t record what we are feeling; we just feel. We soak in those precious minutes because we know that they are fleeting.
In solitude, during quiet hours, and in contemplation of the sorrows of life, I need an outlet for my dark emotions, and so I write. In the middle of sleepless nights, plagued by anxiety and insecurity, I write. When loved ones die, I write. When I am a stranger to myself, living in shadows, I write.
When my editor requested “readable” poems for my debut collection of poems, I wrote narrative, lighter fare. I guess I could place a yellow smiley face on those poems. Those are the ones people seem to like. Those are the ones they understand. Those are the ones that do not remind them of their losses, their sleepless nights, their sorrows, or their nightmares.
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