Darkness at the edge of town

  

Written December 2012

 

“Hello, Darkness my old friend,” an old sixties song starts out, one of those songs that strongly influenced my poetry later, but something I listened to over and over again during a time when I was hiding out from the police, alone in an East LA dive, struggling to make sense of my life.

Perhaps darkness makes up the backdrop of many poets’ lives, as it appears it seems to have influenced her early poetry – at least those few examples I have been able to find.

Her early poetry intrigues me partly because there is so little of it available to examine, to learn from it if she has always wrapped herself up in darkness, solitude and clever metaphor, and for whom she meant to read her poetry when she posted or published it.

The 2003 poem about meeting the old lady on a cruise showed just how cryptic her poetry can be, when trying to reveal something about her deepest and darkest self but only to those who might be clever enough to unlock the secret code to her inner consciousness – although it may be possible that the poem she labeled as “circa 2003” may have been written later when she had already perfected her craft, a poetic reexamination of a critical point in the past.

There is, however, a body of her work from the mid to late 2000s which she posted on some website no longer available for public consumption. Her current blog seems to take back to mid-2011 with the bulk of poems and essays posted in 2012 (so far).

The earliest examples of her poetry I can find are from her college days, well-crafted pieces published by one of the most prestigious universities in the world, but full of the same darkness and solitude some of her current poems express, a darkness at the edge of town, as Bruce Springsteen might say, suggesting she has always lived alone and apart, even at a time of life when she seemed to be on the brink of achieving great things.

This is a darkness that she wrapped around her like a cloak, as one of these poems suggested, as she seems to embrace darkness indeed like an old friend, something she admires, something that simmers under the skin “like thick black tar.”

She sees this darkness as a powerful force, a conqueror that closes in on her “like a secret phobia,” yet still “breathes like skin.”

In a poem she posted earlier this year (which I completely misinterpreted at the time), she talked about stripping reality down to its bones in order to get to the essential truth. But this is clearly this is also a theme she explored in her college poems when darkness (a protector) also produced a prodigy that “teethed” on her, perhaps revealing her essence “like silk worms over relics,” stripping away the superficial, perhaps like a washwoman scrubbing away until the artificial fabric of life is worn to shreds.

In this early poem, she explores the concept of corruption, but not in the sense that she would encounter it today, as something political, but rather as corruption of flesh, and the inability to properly heal after a deep wound, “like sap over a tree scar.”

Then and now, she seems consumed by the concept of seclusion, the need or perhaps fear of darkness that reaches out, calling to her, maybe questioning her false faith in her own independence, a darkness that closes around her, threatening to drown her “like a river,” possibly punishment for things she never said.

For her, darkness is part of her way of life, and old friend, and the reality of the environment she has always lived in, darkness at the edge of town.

 

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