I am young. I am hip.

Sorting through old papers while packing up my study, I came across a folded piece of paper torn out of a notebook. Judging from the notes on one side, it dates to the fall of 2000 or winter of 2001, when I was a freshman in college. On the other side are pencil scribblings, clearly drafted to High-School Sweetheart (now Dear Husband). I think the poem is lyrics to a song that, in my mind, has a country-western tune. I doubt that I ever sent the note underneath them. It's time for June bugs, so for Throwback Thursday I decided to immortalize young love here on the interwebs so I can recycle the piece of paper. Photo is from about that time, maybe the year before, taken one summer in my parents' breakfast room. You can tell the same girl in the picture wrote the following.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

We drive over the bridge^ and
     my heart jumps over the moon.
It's crazy, I know, this feeling
     that everything is all right,
But then again, I have al-
     ways been crazy to the world.

I wish this feeling would last forever.
I wish this feeling could last forever.

But what is forever to the young?
It is now. It is never. I will love you forever.
Forever is the time I spend in Calculus--
     and that seems long enough to have
     more than enough love to last a lifetime.

I am young. I am hip. And I will love you...forever.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

I want to write poetry. I want to write the words so that they are lilting and beautiful and so that they touch you.

Having said that I want to write poetry, does that ruin it? I don't know. I can't help admitting it. Maybe you will think it is--that my writing is like poetry--anyway.

You see, sometimes the words I call poetry well up inside me, bouncing around and buzzing, like June bugs in one of those plastic bags gardeners put out in their yards when the nights begin to warm. If I open the bag for a glimpse of the shiny green beetles, I risk losing the words like so many winged insects. If I don't peek in the bag, the beetles just flounder about in agitated consternation at being trapped, and maybe there will be so many eventually that they escape anyway. Then the close evening sky would be filled with the metallic sheen of the flying beetles quickly becoming mere shadows amid the dusk, soon all gone.


^ This might be the bridge over the railroad yard "we" (my fellow after-school tutors and I) had to cross to get to our Federal Work-Study site, but I am not certain.