When two friends get together, the love between them lasts forever
The opening line to my very first poem. The one that I chose to share with the people who were my WORLD. I didn’t save the original scrap of paper that I had written it on and I don’t quite remember when I wrote it … 1975 … but I did have the foresight to very carefully copy it into an original Charles Schultz Snoopy spiral notebook. A teenage writing memory, sitting at my old red desk, using a Sheaffer fountain pen and copying my words.
Creating my first chapbook.
Blue ink. Because to this day, there’s just something about blue ink.
My initial attempt at poetic form was all about the rhyme. The last word of the first line rhymed with the last word of the second line. AABB, the classic couplet. Until I got to line seven. I loved line six so much that line seven just got swept up in the passion.
On the phone or sitting by me
Isn’t line seven just the dreamiest? I thought so. It’s pretty obvious now that I was most likely dreaming of the guy that I was sitting next to in homeroom every day. Unrequited love. A love strong enough to draw me away from AABB form and into the unheard of world of CCC. I remember agonizing over straying away from AABB, but that line just would not leave me.
I went back to AABB. Not willing to give up my rhyme obsession, but not willing to back away from CCC either. For me, it was groundbreaking. It was the first time I understood that poetry was so much more that I had been taught in high school and my poetry education would probably never be complete.
I did manage to complete my poem, steering my writing back to the couplet, safe ground for a budding bard. DDEE.
Realizing that we will love each other to the final end
A true E.