From the Archives: Teenage Poetry

In my heart of hearts, I have always been a writer. Growing up and on the internet way too early, I stumbled upon roleplaying forums where I would create my own character, or 'OC', and exchange replies back and forth between strangers who were writing on behalf of their own OC or a character from an existing media. My characters ranged from Hogwarts students to Pokémon trainers to badass necromancing vampires. These years were crucial for my growth as a person and as a writer and I've made lifelong friends through it. 

In my more recent teenage years, I wrote poetry as a vessel for my anger, love for other women, and the heartbreak that came with that love. I've hidden that poetry for the longest time, only taking it out to show potential love interests (who tended to assume it was about them, which was awkward) or to make fun of (senseless cruelty to my younger self). Looking back, I've always been proud of it, only fearful of the vulnerability that sharing poetry came with. In an attempt to be more vulnerable as well as kinder to the soulful, teenage Finn who wrote this poetry, I'm compiling that poetry along with the date and age I was when I wrote it below. I have not done any editing and I have no idea if any of them are in their "complete" forms (but is a poem ever really finished?). 

November 21, 2018 (age 16)

fire flame volatile

burns indiscriminately;

the same hearth that roars

in my chest burns down bridges

at the drop of a tone

i boast of my triumphs

"she did this, she said that"

but i wasn't the one being attacked

i was the flame that burnt down cities

anger courses through my veins

like tears stain fevered cheeks

November 22, 2018 

jealousy

is not a shade of green

but it is white

as white as the whites of their eyes

aim your musket and fire

don't believe it when you see it

envy hides behind whispers of

"i'm better than that"

truth is - you're not

you're as human as your ancestors before you

you are not made of your intentions

but you are made of your actions

jealousy is bright bright white

sneaks up and slides in like a ghost

perches itself on your shoulder and draws comparisons without introducing itself

"you're not as talented - you'll never be"

plants the seed of doubt deep in the soil of your heart

December 6, 2018

do you ever long for something

that your heart has never felt?

the soft plucking of guitar strings

the long waving vines coming down

a weeping willow tree 

someone's arms around you

heart purring with content

just you, her, and the universe

closed eyes and the hum of 

the razor against your neck

drops of dysphoria falling from

your head

hands over your eyes

delighted giggles all around

the cold breeze of rain to come

content fills your lungs with

every breath

January 19, 2019

metronome ticking 

in your chest 

cruel waves of teal

crashing against your legs

closed doors closed windows

no light that you can see

you're trapped; you always will be

not worthy of anything

childlike ; never as mature as your peers

always one step behind 

unease creeping in your brain

always in the corner like a 

misshapen laundry pile backlit

January 20, 2019

chapped lips

clinging to their faith

fingers roll over wooden beads

mouth forming mysteries

hailing holy women

begging for forgiveness

pleading for help

February 14, 2019  

icarus flying too close to the sun

reaching out, their fingertips

just barely brushing sun rays

their wax wings fail them 

and send them careening to the ground 

they fall, tumble through the forest canopy

they crash into the soft moss

their ribs crackle like glow sticks

gasping for breath where there is none

forest nymph comes to their rescue

kind smile, pink lips blossoming

she plants ciolets where their heart belonged

she doesn't fix them

but she helps them heal

December 5, 2019 (age 17)

you're still on my mind

when i'm thinking about 

the hole in my heart

heart is still for what 

it used to beat for

butterflies in the stomach

have migrated for the winter

my hands twitch to touch you

only to remember that

you would move away

my baby my baby my baby

isn't my baby no more

fire keeps you warm but not

when it's your bridges burning

September 30, 2020  

 shred yourself open

pick out the pieces that are 

palatable and taste good

ground them into dust and

bury them beneath the earth

give your soul to someone who

deserves it more than you do

someone who is more resourceful

and can create greater good

than you ever could have

bleed yourself out

let your eyes flood with built up

anger and exhaust yourself 

let gasps wreck through you like

a karate chop through a ghost

October 18, 2020

this poem isnt for you

it isnt about you

it isnt because of you

October 20, 2020

your eyes are stinging

tired of crying

you're tired of gasping for air

maybe it's the sickness

maybe it's the weather

maybe it's just because you're nearing the end

everyone tells you you can do it

but you know you can't, you've tried before

"that's defeatist language"

October 25, 2020

that first kiss

was after your concert

i felt so weird around your family

you brought me to that hallway

and leaned down and scared me

it wasn't the last time

it wasn't the worst

i thought you were so much

more mature

that second first kiss

we had planned all morning

met before school in the cafe

sat on the same side of the booth

wish we hadn't tried so hard

spent all day cursing myself

your parents hated me too

if i could have taken it back i would have

that third first kiss

in front of my door,

just drove home

from playing arcade games

caught it on camera

so quick, didn't feel it

didn't process before

you walked away

i dont say i've had my first kiss

they were:

all planned

all weird

all too quick for me to think

its better this way

maybe my next first kiss

won't be over in a blink

May 21, 2021 (age 18)

I am from the tall grass
Playing pretend fairies
Dancing in the dewdrops
Tulip skirt swirled around

I am from shaking fists
Wrapped around rosaries
Pleading to God for a calming hand

I am from wide branches
The tangled roots of a family tree
Cousin, aunt, uncle, whoever you are
Doesn't matter to me

I am from broken hearts
Biting back 'I love you's and holding back touch
Deleting playlists after two weeks
Crushing hopes just to let them rise again

I am from jealous stares
Quick scan, up and down, pick apart the pieces
Seeking any foothold to be better than them

I am from thick, wired lenses
A gap between teeth, round arms
Shaped as a child should be yet
Always feeling too large

I am from tears falling onto a screen
Tapping my emotions into a Notes app
Hiding away poems to be rediscovered and displayed
On a sunnier day

November 20, 2021 (age 19)

you somehow convince yourself

that all of your friends are in love with you

you lay in bed and place your hand on your cheek

soft strokes of your thumb

wonder how it would feel if that warmth wasn’t your own

you’ve gotten close to love but never quite reached it

you wonder if you would be able to recognize it in the street

I Wish I Met Adrienne Rich Earlier

Picture this: You’re me. I’m you (sorry). You’re some sixth grade loser in a Missouri public school. You have a weird pixie cut. You haven’t quite put the pieces together that the poetry that you’re writing in your TARDIS notebook about seeing some pretty girl with hair of gold and eyes of caramel isn’t quite from the perspective of a boy, but you’re pretty darn close to it. You’ll put one and one together and get two in a matter of a few months. You know that you don’t want to be a wife and mother, but whenever you tell your mom, she assures you that you can feel that way now, but later on, you’ll change your mind. Or, rather - and she doesn’t tell you this - something  will change your mind. You shake your head and tell yourself that you will not be committed to the same fate. You will go out there and become a prolific writer, curating worlds of fantasy and love and spreading your ideas from sea to shining sea.

Well, if I were suddenly granted the ability to go back in time and just put a book in your hands, it would be Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. There are a handful of reasons for this: first of all, you need to read poetry that doesn’t only exist on a microblogging website and framed in #36465D blue. While that free-form lyricism sounds pretty, has a lot of reading level Z words, and does have its own value, it would honestly probably be a lot better for your intellectual development if you could name a poet or an author by their name rather than their handle. While you can put those free verse poems in your pocket, telling yourself you’ll look at them later, you’ll only remember them when you’re pulling waterlogged shreds of paper out of your freshly-washed jeans. Being able to have that art in a book rather than a digital void means that you have a literal object to return to whenever you need to remind yourself what’s important or how to put words to your feelings and ideas.

Second of all, you have a lot of feminist beliefs rattling around in your head, and your heart belongs to the women in your life, so why not put those thoughts and feelings into words? Rich will take your hand and walk you through them, from your heart to your head. It will be a little longer before you take your eyes off of the present and look towards the past for your role models, women who felt as frustrated as you do now by the path that society has laid out before you. If you keep walking with Rich, she’ll introduce you to these women that feel the same way you do, an eternal flame burning in your chest when you feel the pressure to sit in your chair and be a “good student” while your male classmates make fools of themselves. Rich will sit you down and talk to you about the plights of trying to fit within the glass box that patriarchy builds around you, tell you that it’s good - and encourage you - to smash it to bits, even if you nick yourself in the process. She’ll point out Emily Dickinson, furiously writing poetry in Amherst, Massachusetts, and you’ll realize that you have plenty of things in common, least of which being your love for dashes. She’ll mention Boadicea and you’ll come to the realization that women have been waging war against oppressive forces long before Joan of Arc, that women didn’t just wake up one day in 1848 and decide to lash out against patriarchal institutions. She can teach you the power of looking into the past from the future, of placing yourself in the perspective of those who lived through them. There is power in this shared perspective, where you can see through the eyes of Elvira Shatayev or Ethel Rosenberg - she’ll tell you that it is “an act of survival”, a way of knowing that you are not alone nor have you ever been.

Finally, Rich will help you discover your affection for the same “gender” (what is that, anyway? - we’ll talk later) isn’t a new phenomenon, isn’t rare, is as old as poetry itself. She can point out that this discovery isn’t just for the young, either - that you can find your truest self time and time again, that you aren’t born only once. She can tell you that you can publish your first collection of lesbian love poems at the age of forty-four after being married to a man for seventeen years. Even doors that seem closed are a little bit ajar, and if they don’t seem to have a knob, there’s always a window. You tell her about that one time in elementary school when you noticed all of your friends making up code names for the boys in your class and decided to choose who you had a crush on, picking out the nicest kid. She might laugh, reaching up to tap the sign, bearing the first half of the title of her 1980 essay: “Compulsory Heterosexuality”! Your brain would probably explode with the realization that most of those girls had probably learned about having crushes on boys from their older family members and had decided that that was the mature thing to do, so you had to make a concentrated effort to pick a nice boy from your class roster in order to feel like you fit in. 

As you go through middle school and high school, your interactions with Rich would change your preference for female friendships from a subconscious happening to a conscious choice. While the girls in your class would claim that they preferred to be friends with boys, that they were less “drama”, you would have words to explain the reasons that you felt differently. You could mention how your friendships with your girl friends are refreshing, that they provide you with the energy that you need to get through the day, and the idea that female friendships were rife with conflict was an idea posited by patriarchal society which wanted to prevent connections between women that would allow them to see the cracks in the dominant structures. You might not mention that your heartbeat sped a little faster whenever you could make one of your friends laugh and fill the room with the sound of windchimes.

My First Semester at Cottey

I moved into my dorm room in P.E.O. Hall on the twentieth day of August. It was probably the most humid day in my entire life, worsened by the fact that it was the only residential hall without any air conditioning and we were carrying heavy boxes, bins, and suitcases inside from the car and up the stairs.  My roommate and her family were already there since they had stayed the night in town, so the decision of which side of the room would be mine was already made for me. She was from Texas, and you know what they say - everything's bigger in Texas, and apparently the same was true for her tote bins full of clothing and her attitude. After tearful goodbyes were exchanged between me and my family, I spent my first night at college trying to ignore the overhead light and the sound of my new roommate as she packed all of her things into her closet and dresser. 

That was the first issue that I encountered here - a loud, transphobic, rude 24-year-old woman who stopped being my roommate and became my suitemate before classes even began. Despite the rough start, I have genuinely enjoyed my first semester in college and I'm sad to see it come to an end.

A piece of advice that you hear near constantly as somebody going into your freshman year is that it is important to get out of your dorm between classes and mealtimes, so you should join a club that is related to something that you're interested in. While I was in high school, I developed a passive interest in how student leadership worked and how events were developed from concepts into a real function. I never actually participated in my school's student council, so the Student Government Association sounded too intimidating. I wasn't nearly as interested in that side of student leadership either, so I joined the Student Activities Committee instead. If I'm being completely honest, this might have been one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. I met one of my best friends Emily there, and we've been able to help some really fun events become real. To celebrate the near end of the year, SAC hosted a Late Night Breakfast where students could eat breakfast food, enter raffles for large and small prizes, play board games, and just generally enjoy each others' company. It was wildly successful with a long line and two hundred and fifty students in attendance - a number extremely close to the number of students who attend Cottey. 

I also decided to enter the running as the secretary of the Freshman Class Council, another excellent idea of mine. After an entirely improvised campaign speech, I was voted into office by my fellow first-years and became a member of FCC. Cottey is a school that has a lot of traditions, and since I'm only a freshman I figured that being in FCC would be the best way to be able to help the senior class. Most of our traditions are put on by seniors (anybody in their second year or above), so they remain a mystery to freshmen until they experience them. One of the traditions that the Freshman Class Council does participate in is the creation of a class mascot for those entering the college that year. We all came up with ideas for the class mascot and the freshmen voted for Fauna the Phoenix - which I feel is a very symbolic animal for our class since many of our junior and senior years were interrupted by COVID-19. 

Another tradition here is the adoption of younger students by a senior student - it's similar to how sororities work, but it's healthier and less toxic. My senior is Tori, who has quickly become one of my closest friends. I met her at the very beginning of the school year since she was the orientation leader of a group I had some friends in and we've been friends ever since. I'm not only grateful for her but for the friends of hers that she's introduced me to, who have quickly become my friends as well. 

One of the best friends that I've made here is Raina, who lives in Iowa suite with me.  I'm not sure I would have gotten through this semester with her support and the way that she can make any situation feel lighter and easier with just one simple joke. I love and appreciate her more than I can say and I cherish our late-night Sonic runs. 

Oh, yeah, and my grades and actual classes are important, too. I'm currently enrolled in fifteen credits and I plan on taking eighteen next semester - it's a little bit intimidating but I've decided that I can do it as long as I do better and stay more focused than I did this semester. It's still finals week at the time that I'm posting this, so fingers crossed that I will do well on those so I can have a relaxing winter break.