This poem was written in the summer of 1982 while I was at music camp. The camp was held in an old fort that had once been a military training base. The grounds featured an immense grassy "parade field", over a mile around the perimeter, one side of which faced on a steep bluff overlooking the ocean. It was an excellent place out onto the middle of which to run, spin around and around, collapse on your back--and feel yourself falling into space, released from the hold of gravity. It was great.

Looking Up

I am a blade of grass

waving at myself

held huge in the sky

stretched taut over the skin of myself

rolling endlessly away beneath my touch

Like many of us I wrote many piles of poetry while in High School. I was a self-consciously intellectual teenager (a terrible combination: you're exquisitely aware of all the stupid things you're doing, and there's not a thing you can do about it), and more than a little pretentious when it came to "my writing" (erk). I wrote one poem about my fears surrounding sex/sexuality that a friend of mine liked so much she had it published in the school literary magazine--without telling me. Ahem.

You won't be reading that poem here. Or any other poem I wrote, for that matter. This is because I like you.

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