Lately, my favorite pastime has been physical decluttering—which, paradoxically, creates more mental clutter. I sift through boxes with ruthless efficiency, discarding roughly 70% of what I unearth. It’s a journey into the artifacts of a former self: stacks of scribbled longhand from a time when pen and paper were still my medium of choice.
Inside these boxes: fragments of half-finished stories, the first stabs at chick-lit novels that never made it past chapter four, essays and letters that trailed off mid-thought, rogue journal entries, to-do lists, and a deeply embarrassing archive of bad poetry.
Poetry so exquisitely terrible it deserves one final hurrah here before I send it to the recycling gods. And ironically, if I tried to write something this bad on purpose now, it wouldn’t come close. Because true bad poetry has a secret ingredient: absolute sincerity.
And so, with love and zero shame, I offer the following from a decade ago, composed by a younger me with a big heart and questionable metaphors.
Beth
Matured intensity of a city dweller.
Urban foraging, empty aspiration.
Indulge her and taste the city:
Concrete and butts, tucked
under your tongue like a pill.
The Pleasure of Bread
Suppose I talk about the pleasure of bread:
The mutual love when mouth and food are wed,
The smell and taste of giving life,
the grainy flesh yields to a knife.
Have you had the pleasure of my bread?
(Un)titled
In the morning it’s instant coffee and hard-boiled eggs.
His index finger rubs salt over the yielding whites,
and he watches me eat and sip. He looks here and there
for things that may not be there.
We know to go East, to ignore the ripe fruits, and
to hide our faces when the birds call.
Walking through the hallowed corridors:
We’re looking for the kind of comfort
that only comes after extreme discomfort.
Our sanity long since plucked, our
eyes blink away dirt and tears, searching
for a place to repose.
I don’t think I’ll keep these. But I’ll remember them.
They’re proof I was always writing—even when I had no idea what I was trying to say.
