Inside The Hearts' Walls

If I ever left Corvallis


If I ever left you,
‘  I would never be the same,
   I would never quite recover,
   I might somehow lose my name.
   I could not forget your colors--
   Your soft and sporty gray,
    Or those cheesy chunky snowflakes,
    You bring out each Christmas Day,
    Or that pink you say is salmon,
    Or that gold you say is brown,
    You’re my gold and salmon heartbreak,
    I just can’t let you down.
    So many scents are my reminders,
    Of all the things we were,’
    Although when I try to bring to mind,
    They smudge and smooch and blur.
     The rubber tired pavement,
     The sweet fresh scent of lawn,
     The occasional whiff of sultry smoke,
      Oh, I’ll miss you when I’m gone!
       If I ever left you,
       I would never quite forget,
      The way you act on game day,
      Like you owe the crowds a debt.
       The rush the roar the shouting,
       Your orange and black and pride,
        I always groaned hrmmph outwardly,
        But I was proud of you inside,
        For all you are you’re not yet,
        But someday you’ll become,
        And grow and change and change and grow
        And somehow still seem young,
        So if ever again I hear that song,
        That one night became ours,
        When the old man with the violin,
        Played underneath the stars,
        If I hear that song some someday hour,
        On an old forgotten stair,
        Or an old forgotten park bench,
        It will haul me back right there,
        To all our times at schools and dances,
        And rainy old busstops,
        Or our red umbrella moments,
        On the way to coffee shops,
‘       But now that I am leaving you
        To help me dull the pain,
       I  pulled out  my friends sound advice,
        Saved for penniless days or rain
       That sometimes yeah you fall in love,
        Then go your separate ways,
   It hurts and aches but snap it heals,
    And you start fresh again one day.
   Yet maybe now even as I write this
     I finally see the light,
    Because I think inside,  wise as she was,,
    My friend must not be right ,
   So maybe instead I‘ll tell her so,
    That this isn’t what you thought,
     You made it sound so easy,
     But love is simply not….

         or…..
                     at least

                                    not when you’re in love with

                                                       a
                                                                    whole

                                                                                         entire

                                                                                                town.

(you’re my ebony orange darling and I just can’t let you down.)

"What will you do when you become a top executive in a large company?" my textbook asks me, deadpan.

The topic is Business Ethics.
The question is not entirely facetious,
And the presumption is enormous.

When I become a top executive in a large company...
Is that who I'll be?
Is that who I am?
I should know the answer to this, if anyone should.

Should I dream up an exciting future for myself,
Call it a goal, and in so doing, in that instant,
Resign myself to the sacrifice of all other conflicting dreams?

Am I arrogant enough to call my goals expectations?
No. I've made that mistake before.

So, who will I be? Who will I become?
Sometimes I have to be okay with the answer,
'I don't know.'

--------------------------

By Turtle Shell

Next Poetry Club meeting is scheduled for January 4, 2011. We are encouraging everyone to bring a friend along to this first meeting of the new term.

The prompt for the January 4 meeting is something along the lines of: 'I have not yet become who I am'. I'm afraid that's as close as I can recall it at the moment. It's about growing into or becoming who you will be, or maybe about being who you will be, or something like that.

Edit: Enough people wrote poems based on the above rough approximation that I've decided not to delete it, but I do have the exact prompt now. It is as follows:

"All you are you are not yet."

It's apparently a paraphrase of a line from a long poem that I haven't seen and don't know the name of.