Where's Waldo (Emerson)?

“How the hell do I write poetry,” I asked my online friends. I’m not a poet, and my friends were eager to remind me. They suggested I stick with what I do well, which is prose.

Determined to prove them wrong, and with visions of wearing all black, sporting a goatee, donning a beret, and being surrounded by bohemian women, I set out to write a poem. But how do I do that? Well, I checked out some web pages on how to write poems. That prepared me as well as any college level class.

So on a boring Sunday, I hopped on my motorcycle, determined to write. I stopped by my work place to grab a tablet and a pen. Hey, there were some other people working. Crazy. Working on a Sunday. Don’t they know it’s the day of worship that should be spent goofing off?

Once armed with the tools of an author, I rode up the mountain. I finally made it to the canyon lookout, having to pass tourists like I was a MotoGP rider. The sky was blue. The air was cool. The breeze was gentle. The grass was green. The tree was lonely. So I sat on the green grass, under the lonely tree, feeling the cool air of the blue sky. And I wrote.

I quickly wrote two pages of really sappy stuff that I would be embarrassed to show my friends. If those pages ever got out, I would have to turn in my man-card. However, now that I had a bunch of thoughts, on paper in prose, I figured I just needed to distill the verbiage until what remains is just the essence of feelings. So off to riding again to reset my brain.

After a quick lap down the mountain and back, I started my rewrite. No wait. Before that, there was a Japanese tour group at the lookout. The translator was the mom of a childhood friend. She talked to me for a bit, then she talked to one of the female tourists. My Japanese sucks, but she explained how the tiger ears were mine, and how I was a 4th generation Japanese-American. That tourist kept staring and smiling at me. Of course I will admit that I am such a stud that foreigners can’t keep their eyes off of me, but I think the reason she kept staring was due to the way I was dressed. I had a shirt on that said, “pervert,” in Japanese.

So the tour group left and I was alone to rewrite my poem. I worked on it for about an hour. Scribbling, rewriting, erasing, thinking. In the end, I was totally unhappy with the result. I hate to say it, but perhaps my online buddies were right. Maybe I should forget about poetry and visions of beatnik grandeur, and I should just stick with prose.

The only thing I wrote that I was happy with was: She’s the etch on my heart that makes it skip a beat.