"Emo Poem I Apparently Wrote" by Shane Ryan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shane Ryan is an art student from Boston, Massachusetts with a love for both visual and verbal languages. He spends his time either writing or pursuing realism with a ballpoint pen.
We picnicked in the sun-streaked
Or moon-sleeked hills of the province,
Drank from forest pools, wore false halos.
The mountain of our consummation,
Wreathed in clouds, blue,
Stood in distant silence, awaiting us,
And the village conformed to our course,
Improvised every few steps a cobblestone path,
Sumac and smoke bush to line it.
We shared our first drink there,
In a tavern several centuries old.
Our callings cleaved us,
I read Borges down that corridor
Between our schools, satellite and center,
I began a project without you,
To fill that intermittent void,
Attempting to short-circuit control,
So that no regime of signs could
Disempower my truth,
And I broke the matrix,
Random details became Easter eggs,
Every word clicked, meaning doubled,
I became the poet laureate of a republic as yet illusory,
Accessed an alien stream of consciousness,
A progressive signifying chain
Only I could keep pace with,
So readily did the models arrive,
So soon disappear, as my lover,
Wearing her negligee, one morning
Standing by a window,
The entropy of the metropolis finally explicit,
Once an organized city, unfolding rigorously
From the center, the center we represented,
And I sat in a chair watching her,
Powerless to speak, to console her, to change
Her mind, and before soon I lay in my bed watching time
Express its passage on my ceiling,
In the form of a mundane light show,
Dusk to dawn, waiting for the next hint
Of something I feared would never come,
Joy’s first flickering scintilla,
A moment as on that rich tapestry
Depicting an Arcady unmistakably ours,
That the fire consumed, as it did me,
That psychiatry extinguished, too late,
Leaving only the horse and the hay wain
We rode to that summit
On which we first made love,
There parked, in the corner,
A curiosity, defining an obscure pathos,
Rendering what we had,
All of it, apocryphal.