Latest Poem from Poetry Class. "Box of Ashes".

Box of Ashes

Perhaps if you had raised me

rather than leaving me

with your mean and spiteful mother,

who became my vacant headed

and befuddled grandmother,

who offered no comfort

but a roof over my head,

all the food I could gorge myself on

rather than teach me

what to do with my emotions,

who created a monster

by giving him a lavish lifestyle,

gilded his cage,

filled his cell with

all the treasures a boy desired

sent him into the world

with no self-control

my youth became as worthless

as a box of ashes

A mother to me,

Is just an irritating, annoying stranger

who tried to discipline me

on the random, rare occasions

you came to see me

Why are you here?

You knew more about the goings on

of all the bars in Syracuse

Than what was going on

inside your lonely son’s mind

only a few miles away

as he tried to make sense of

his life as he grew

Perhaps if I had a real mother

I wouldn’t be a convicted felon,

drug abuser,

thief,

money waster,

whore monger,

liar,

calculating predator,

accomplished actor,

so accomplished

he doesn’t even know who he is,

who’s been trying

to figure it out

by thrashing around

and flagellating in his environment

all these years

until he becomes

just another box of ashes

Out with some friends

Downtown one night

I came upon you loaded

As you sat with your friends

At a table in front of Quigley’s

and you did not know

I was standing

in front of you

mere feet away

Where were your “friends”

that you spent so much time with,

all these years

who you abandoned me for

so you could have companions

to drown yourself in alcohol

and talk about petty, mundane events

Where were they

when you asphyxiated from your asthma

by yourself in your apartment

these people just as worthless

as a box of ashes

Left behind a nine year old crippled dog,

that I used to watch you baby more

than you ever did to me,

another abandoned thing

for someone else to take care of

did you get him

to fill some emptiness inside

The same emptiness

that became my entire life?

Left me with

your belongings that you

compulsively accumulated

over the years

that I had to sell for pennies,

donate to the rescue mission,

take to your mother’s apartment

so she could live amongst this debris

so we wouldn’t get stuck with paying for

another month’s rent for yours

because I already had

the credit card debt to cremate you

and now a box of ashes to dispose of.

It is so easy for me to tell a woman

I love her with straight face

This word means nothing to me,

it is merely a tool

that has it’s proper uses

for certain occasions

When I was a boy

Someone used to speak

this foreign word to me

then turn around and leave

When you were barely out the door

your mother would tell me

what a horrible person you were

because I didn’t know you

I didn’t know

what to believe.

When your mother passes away

Some years from now

Leaving me the last

Surviving member

of the family

That box of ashes

Will finally get scattered

By seagulls and rodents

Searching for sustenance

In some landfill somewhere.

Professor uses my poem as an example in his lesson.

The professor of my Poetry class uses my poem as an example to teach our class.

Although we will be discussing how poetry condenses or compresses language in subsequent lectures, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the topic and cite selections from poems the class has submitted. These are "before" and "after" selections to demonstrate how the information presented can be done with fewer words, tighter lines, and shorter stanzas.

What do we mean when we identify poetic language as different from prose?
Among the many differences, the foremost is compactness. Poets use imagery, symbolism, metaphor and other mechanisms to pack a great deal of substance--emotions, ideas, information--into each line of poetry. In this lecture, the mechanism that interest us is the the process by which unnecessary words are eliminated. Where prose often conveys meaning in expansive ways, using complete sentences and grammatically correct structures, poetry not only manages with fewer words but strives for fewer words. Poetry tries to use a minimum number of words to encapsulate, preserve and amplify a particular experience, sensation, thought or feeling. One critic describes this as "stripping language to its bare essentials" to make the intended point.
Poetic lines are thus not automatically created by simply chopping up a prose paragraph into individual lines, but rather by making conscious choices to choose one word over another, or in this instance, by discarding words that are not necessary, repetitive for no purpose, or lacking needed meaning.
What are some of these words that can often be be discarded?
1. Prose sentences contain words that exist only to create grammatically correct sentences. "It is Tuesday" and "It is raining" and "There is a cockroach" are sentences that each have just one important word: Tuesday, raining, cockroach. The other words are there to create the subject-verb structure of the typical sentence in English. They are completely superfluous in poetic lines.
2. Other words poets often manage without are: is, are, was, were, (especially in "there is" or "there are," often avoided by prose writers as well). They are called "verbs of being," and they function only to indicate time in a sentence, while "verbs of action" such as walk, climbed, running, fought provide information about both time and action, and are thus so much more valuable in poetry!
3. Then there are all sorts of function words speakers and prose writers use, such as: such as, for example, in addition, and other such words that connect and separate ideas, but can easily replaced with line breaks in poetry.
4. But for my money, the most superfluous words in poetry (most obviously in first person poems) are the self-reflective comments: I thought, I remmbered, I decided, I had the feeling that, it seemed to me, and so on, endlessly. The speaker or narrator in the poem is obviuosly doing all these things. Why is it necessary to characterize the obvious? If the poet writes "When I was back in seminary/they put forth the proposition/that you can petition the Lord/with prayer," is it really necessary to say "I remember?" And when the poet continues: "Petition the Lord with prayer?/You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!" is it really necessary to say, "Now, when I think about how I felt back then I have come to the decision that?" 
Obviously there are other ways to condense the poetic line--imagery, symbolism, metaphor, sound, line breaks, to name a few--but for our purposes here, let's pretend that the only requirement is to render a written line more succinctly, more tersely, more tightly by eliminating the unnecessary, the pointlessly repetitive, the self-reflective, and the words devoid of content. To illustrate, here are some lines from poems class members have submitted and shorter, more concise, more crisp, more direct and more condensed lines.

ORIGINAL #1

Ode to City Electric

This is a great place to work,
They say with a straight face.
Someday you can become a salesman too
Making the owner Sandy millions,
sitting at a comfortable desk
working at a leisurely pace.

Then someone appears one day, you’re told
To learn the computer system
To take the comfortable place of one of those
calm, content people
Sitting at a desk in one of those rooms upstairs,
Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,

Dirty warehouse worker,
Unfit to breathe the same air.

Why are you taking so long
Filling orders?
Searching high and low
for something not there.
But according to the computer it is,
Are you blind?
Is the prescription on those glasses you wear
Up to date?
We by the virtue of being employees
Of the great City Electric
Can get a 15 percent discount at Lens crafters
You sightless, stupid fool.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for,
Search the area nearby
Where the computer says it should be.
Develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,
Telepathy, telekinesis.

COMPRESSED VERSION #1

 Ode to City Electric

“This is a great place to work,” they say with a straight face,
“Someday you can become a salesman too.”
Then someone appears one day,
tells me to learn                                      (the active uses fewer words than the passive)
the computer system,
to take the comfortable place of calm, content people                 
sitting at a desk in rooms upstairs,                    (in one of those unncessary) 
Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,

            Dirty warehouse worker,
            Unfit to breathe the same air.

“Why are you taking so long filling orders?”
I search high and low for something not there.
“Are you blind, sightless, stupid fool.
City Electric employees get 15% Lens Crafters discount"
or develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,
Telepathy, telekinesis.

Professor's Response to my memory/location poem.

"100%. 75 points. There is a lot of anger in here which animates the poem. It definitely tells a story and identifies characters, placing them in action. What I like most are the quoted lines (which you should put within quotes). They sound like real conversation, making the story move efficiently even as they characterize the speakers.
When you revise for Module 6, focus on getting rid of excess words and uninteresting phrases. As a poet, edit the actual events--there is no need to recount things exactly as they happened but rather the way they work best in the poem. Also, you have too many line breaks which interfere with the continuity of the story--many of these could be combined for longer lines and shorter stanzas. You actuallly have a fairly long time frame and a long development as you provide a sense of what goes on, then the firing, then the period after being fired while you are still there. Think about compressing each segment so that the language becomes tighter. Finally, work on the ending which seems rather anticlimactic. A sense of the self also should be included, not just the decision to go  back to school. It's also a rather flat line. Still, you did an excellent job at this stage of the poem!
Please post this in the Discussion Drop Box

comments for my city electric poem.

English 206 Poetry. My Memory Poem

 This is a poem I just submitted for my Poetry class. It is in homage to a great and wonderful place, one of many that I had the pleasure of working at for what was a sadly short three month, from November of  '08 to January of 2009. It has been edited for conciseness that the professor requires. I will include the long edition some time in the future.

Ode to City Electric

This is a great place to work,

They say with a straight face.

Someday you can become a salesman too

Making the owner Sandy millions,

sitting at a comfortable desk

working at a leisurely pace.

Then someone appears one day, you’re told

To learn the computer system

To take the comfortable place of one of those

calm, content people

Sitting at a desk in one of those rooms upstairs,

Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,

Dirty warehouse worker,

Unfit to breathe the same air.

Why are you taking so long

Filling orders?

Searching high and low

for something not there.

But according to the computer it is,

Are you blind?

Is the prescription on those glasses you wear

Up to date?

We by the virtue of being employees

Of the great City Electric

Can get a 15 percent discount at Lens crafters

You sightless, stupid fool.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for,

Search the area nearby

Where the computer says it should be.

Develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,

Telepathy, telekinesis.

My coworkers agree

He’s a fucking asshole

Doesn’t want to listen to the blaring sports report

Doesn’t want to talk shit

Doesn’t want to hear me quote

Spaceballs all day

“Let the Swartz be with you”.

Doesn’t want to take Travis’s spot

Putting away shit

all day in the warehouse.

One of my coworkers who had been here

for some miserable years.

Dying to escape

From the monotony of the warehouse,

of days, months, years,

running up and down three flights of stairs,

of the moods of fat, moody Farnham.

Send me please to another branch

Put me on the road

Free from the prison of the warehouse

I’ll do anything. PLEASE!!!

Tell Farnham the boss

when you’re on your lunch break,

All the things you’ve confessed.

In what you foolishly thought

Was their confidence,

From having psychotic fantasies

To hating having to work here.

Hired as a backup driver,

a guy they call “Glue-stick”,

the dispatcher of this place,

his name some unpronounceable

Balkan last name

comes up to you in their midst.

“Do you know where such and such place is?”

Before you can form a thought

The others desperately and agitatedly

yell, “Oh, Oh, Oh, I know where that is”.

Wednesday my favorite day,

the only day they let me drive.

So I make it last the whole of the day.

Day trip to the Rochester store,

stop at the rest area,

then after your delivery

picking up half of what

you delivered last week as a return,

then tearing off as fast as I can

to stop at the diner down the street for brunch,

coming back to jealous co-workers

who spent the whole day

talking shit about you behind your back

as they spent the day

running up and down three flights of stairs.

Terminated after the holidays

for “poor performance”.

But we’re so nice

“We’ll let you work out your last two weeks”.

Their mistake.

Big mistake.

Now I get paid to lolly gag

more aggressively than before.

Smashing bulbs,

graffiti the place.

"Harvesting" batteries.

Do you want to buy some back?

I have so many

They’ll go bad before I can ever use them.

What was I thinking?

Stuffing boxes of them

down my pants, behind my belt,

inside my pants,

front and sometimes back.

One on each side of my jacket,

in pockets that seemed to welcome them.

On and off for months as the weather got cold,

then two or three times a day

after I was told I was “laid off”

How about some flashlights?

So many dumps like this

I have worked in.

Sweated,

Sometimes bled,

And cried when I got home.

This lesson existed before me,

for so many years,

unwilling to learn.

The only way to escape?

The one that finally sunk in.

Go back to school.

Get yourself

a Bachelor’s Degree.