Somewhere-Celina

This is my response to the Pick and Choose book "Endarkenment" by Jeffrey McDaniel, who I find to be an incredible poet. This style stood out from the rest of the poems in the book, as the lines were very short and there wasn't much fantastic description. However, it was still an extremely powerful poem. My poetry tends to be jam-packed with adjectives with long descriptive lines that ease into my point, so for this exercise I attempted to emulate the concise power that came across in "Guidebook to Nowhere." It was difficult for me to write a poem in plain-speak without many descriptors but I learned the power of more direct, simple language and I really enjoyed the outcome.

Guidebook to Nowhere
by Jeffrey McDaniel

I wear a patch
over my right eye.
Not because
it’s damaged.
I’m saving the eye
for a rainy day,
saving it from
all this crap.
One day I’ll
go to the desert,
and I’ll switch
the patch to my
left eye. And
I’ll only look
at cacti, and
butterflies, and
jackrabbits, but
never in the mirror
and never at
the sky, and like
this I’ll train
myself to see
the difference
between what’s real
and manmade.


Somewhere

I wore a patch
over my right eye
to waste the left
and seal the truth
for one of those
tongue-dead days
when no more
can be said
of this world.
I went to the desert
to be in the company
of still, living things
still living the way
I thought things
should. What I found
with my right eye
was blindness
just the same.