These are not my poems. These were written by my friend Kate Temple-West. She's been a poet since we were about 6 years old. Actually, I have one of her poems from when we were 9. Here it is:
The Purple Dog
Under the Magic cherry tree
lives a little purple dog;
who is as cute as he can be.
He likes to visit me,
for afternoon tea.
Kate Temple-West, c. 1986
My sister found that in a book we cleared out of my Mom's house.
I also have a video (yes, VHS) of the first play she wrote and produced. Circa 1992. I even have the program. I'm saving that for when they teach her in schools. Then I can pull down a boatload on it.
But last year she did a 30 day poem challenge. One poem a day for 30 days. This one was my favorite. Have you read The Phantom Tollbooth? It has the Terrible Trivium, who traps travelers into useless tasks that can never be accomplished, and the Lethargians, who you can't see but who are sent to enforce laws against thinking and laughing, and the Senses Taker, who can convince you that your only purpose in life is to answer useless questions. It think that Kate's Deadly Shoulds belong in this pantheon.
The Deadly Shoulds
Let them go
All of them
Do not let
one shadow
remain
of the shoulds
the deadly shoulds
Scrap them
Burn them
Trick them
Vomit them up and out
They will try to snare you
with their wheedling whining pleas
their antiseptic perfume
their weighted compliments
their prickly handshakes
They will grey your flesh
Cover you in dust
File you under undone
They will rifle through your dream machine
Put red rubber stoppers on all your gaskets
Plug up the exhaust system
Chase out the fairies
Choke out the magic plants
and leave you trussed
vacant
and full of lists.
Kate Temple-West, April 15, 2009 (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=72352596375)
But as a person who just wants to make everyone I care about happy, I have to give you all this one too:
You can’t make other people happy.
That's the conventional wisdom.
But I want to.
I want to push them off cliffs
into oceans of their own happiness.
Maybe I can do that.
After all, conventional wisdom agrees
its very possible to push people off cliffs.
I will lure them to their cliff edges
by baking violet cakes topped with dandelion frosting
and placing them on the paths leading up.
I will bribe the birds to sing sweeter the steeper the climb.
I will tell stories to distract them,
and when we reach the top
I will lie and say their shoelaces are untied.
And then I will run at them,
pushing with all of my weight,
a low deep battle cry booming from my chest
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
until we sail out beyond the rock,
flying for a moment
before tumbling into a frothy sea
full of frolicking dolphins,
laughter washing over our bodies
in waves.
Kate Temple-West, 2009 (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76129211375)
And finally, this one's for me, because today my horoscope said that even though I'm grown up now, I can still believe in the things I believed in when I was a child. And for me that means believing in magic. And if I'm going to believe in magic, I might as well believe in that horoscope. And in Kate's poem that is the magical stories we shared when we were children:
I looked down a rabbit hole and saw only dirt, no cottontail, even.
I pushed my way into the back of the wardrobe and found a fox stole with the head intact. It had claws and fangs and smelled like mothballs.
I walked over a bridge in the woods, eyes closed, and found myself on the other side of the stream.
I scrambled over the crumbling brick wall and found another patch of poison ivy.
I crawled through the drainpipe and came out the other end, a little farther away from where I had started.
But I could smell the roses of Wonderland, taste the Turkish Delight of Narnia, see the majestic river of Terabithia, hear the birds chirping in a secret garden, and feel the velvet air in my own as yet unnamed enchanted world.
Kate Temple-West, 2009 (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=78160626375)
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