Antsy and angsty in the middle of the night, I throw off my sheets and turn on the light. I'm looking for something to read.

It's not hard to find it... or rather find that I don't have it. I only grabbed a small handful of books when I left home. The only books of poetry I brought with me are old issues of my high school literary magazine.

The quantity of appalling poetry isn't why I avoid looking through them to find my inspiration--but the quantity of that quantity which is *my* poetry is. Oh, yes, I used to be quite prolific, smugly believing I turned a pretty phrase now and again. I'm still fond of a number of those poems, those exploits of literature and youth.

Oh, my, I just skimmed my section of the 2001 edition... a full ten entries, up from eight the previous year... and I wanted to run screaming from my own head. I was very fond of rhymes. Occasionally I managed to use it in an adorable Shel Silverstein kind of way, but too often rhymes were employed to "heavy" topics in an annoying sing-songy way.

But here's an example of a rhyming poem I still like, one that still holds truth a decade (!!!!) later:

Danger Zone

My bed is a graveyard
of habits and tasks,
of flares of activity
that just didn't last:

A job from last weekend
still haunts me this wayL
needlenose pliers
and here they'll stay;

My wallet discarded
spilling from it
ID cards and pictures
given as gifts;

Two weeks ago's laundry
clean but still out,
my fuzzy slippers
and other shoes, no doubt;

Old work from school
on which I'm now scrawling,
but it already has doodles
of soda cans brawling;

A book that I'm reading,
a Gameboy near dead,
a brush and recorder,
any room for my head?

Small pieces of candy,
my computer, no less
(do you think that this may
cause my mother distress?).

Due to CDs and text books
among nameless more
I think that tonight
I'll sleep on the floor.

Funny. Now my bed *is* on the floor.

And, no, despite my proximity to said bed, I am no closer to sleep.