An Unexpected Poem

I've been trying to get poems out of my notebooks and into electronic format, typing up a few each weekend. Once all of the poems in the notebooks have a line drawn across each page, I will stash the notebooks away and probably never look at them again. The notebooks have poems in their embryonic state; not until I rewrite them and see them typed up are they viable.

I found a little stanza that I started and abandoned when my son was a few months old. I confess that I didn't fall in love at first sight with my baby like some people do. I fell in love suddenly one morning when he was 3 months old. I loved him before that, but it took awhile for me fall head over heals the way everyone said I would. It took me by surprise one morning when I looked down in his crib and he smiled at me - suddenly, I couldn't breath. I was smitten.

When I typed up the baby stanza yesterday, it grew into a full poem, as unexpectedly as the heady love I wrote about. Even more unexpectedly, it took on a rhyme scheme, albeit an irregular one. Knowing me, it will probably undergo a few more rewrites before I'm done, but I kind of like it in it's current state.

( Unexpected )

A Poem That Only I Can Relate To

I've always hated that poets sic poems on the public that nobody can relate to unless they walked in the poet's own shoes. It seems - I don't know - self indulgent.

That's exactly the type of poem I'm posting here. Maybe I'm hoping that I describe the situation well enough that you can imagine wearing the shoes the narrative describes. More likely, I'm just being a self-indulgent poet. What other kind is there?

A few post back I wrote about how I sometimes wake up with a low glucose level and the effect this has on Jeff if it happens too often (that is, it scares the piss out of him). I don't write about my diabetes too much; living with it is a routine thing for me and there's not much to write about. I wrote this poem after a particularly annoying episode that made me late for work one day. Jeff wasn't home, so I dealt with it myself. In the first draft of this poem, I didn't say what it was about, so I added a reference to the insulin to give the reader a hint. I'm hoping that reference makes the whole thing less self indulgent. Probably not.

I wrote this poem in a fit of frustration. I had to get a doctor's note explaining to my personnel department how this sort of thing could make me late if and when it happened, and doing so made me feel freakish and vulnerable. When you have a difference, a legal disability, passing for normal is a big deal. Alas, it's not always possible.

FYI, a severe hypoglycemic episode feels like being very intoxicated and incoherent, but with a rush of adrenaline on top. I imagine it's like drinking a large bottle of Jim Beam through a funnel and then snorting a few lines of cocain to compliment it. I've never done either of these things, but it's as close as I can get to an analogy.


( Waking Up Low )