Dec 2013
At a young age I grasped a pen.
Held it tight in my fist to make circles on a page
As if I was enraged,
But at that age it was all in good fun.
Soon enough someone,
I can’t remember who,
taught me how to hold one.
Pencils became cool.
I could make mistakes in school,
Then erase my error forever forgetting
That I may have been a fool
when spelling my own name with a lowercase K…
A school boy error.
But that’s just what I was.
A school boy.
I remember being introduced to crayons.
I thought to myself,
ALL OF THE COLORS ?!
Every color I could not even imagine.
Colors I could not pronounce,
Colors of pride,
Colors of passion,
And when I was asked to use these colors,
at first being young,
I chose to abuse these colors.
I’d put red where it didn't belong,
And orange where you would think it was wrong.
Use pink for people and purple for pants,
Brown for the ground,
And one time,
Just this one time,
I made the grass blue,
And the clouds green.
That made me laugh,
Because this world was that page,
And that page was mine.
I crossed and I scribbled all over the lines.
And when I was finish I’d go running to tell what I’d done.
My father would look and say
“Wow!”
“That’s beautiful son.”
And then my exhibit of art
Would hang neatly from the refrigerator door.
But that
does not
happen
any
more
I grew older.
And as time passed,
the lines grew to be guidelines and laws.
Rules began to apply, I did abide.
My right to be free was strictly denied.
Each stroke of a color, each stroke of a pen!
When would my hand dance freely again?
I learned of letters from A to Z,
In love with language I won spelling bees,
Put consonants with vowels to make words,
Learned adjectives, verbs, nouns, and adverbs.
I was a proud little nerd,
And I still felt this deep discontentment.
An egg hatched and I was not yet a bird.
Where was the wind beneath my wings,
to give me a feeling fly enough to make me sing?
I began to fall.
Fall fast into the depth of misunderstanding.
If knowledge is power,
Why were my heart and soul disbanding?
In frustration I sat in contemplation,
Pondering thoughts and memories,
of when I was most happy.
Looking through old picture books I found a folded piece of paper with the only solution to my problem.
The page had my name at the bottom.
Lines danced and trapeze from one side of the page to the other.
No sense,
No order,
Just ink.
I understood with a smile,
I hung that picture on my bedroom wall,
I opened a book and held a pen.
On lined paper I put line after line with occasional rhyme.
I used letters to laminate life.
I used words to take flight.
I used sentences to draw dreams.
I used what I knew and what I had seen.
Words are wisdom, what wisdom gains value when not shared with what we know as the world.
So when playing with ink, understand to be free,
understand your responsibility to others when they see what you have created in secrecy, and let there be no limit to what you think is outside that box.
That is how you dabble with ink.
Held it tight in my fist to make circles on a page
As if I was enraged,
But at that age it was all in good fun.
Soon enough someone,
I can’t remember who,
taught me how to hold one.
Pencils became cool.
I could make mistakes in school,
Then erase my error forever forgetting
That I may have been a fool
when spelling my own name with a lowercase K…
A school boy error.
But that’s just what I was.
A school boy.
I remember being introduced to crayons.
I thought to myself,
ALL OF THE COLORS ?!
Every color I could not even imagine.
Colors I could not pronounce,
Colors of pride,
Colors of passion,
And when I was asked to use these colors,
at first being young,
I chose to abuse these colors.
I’d put red where it didn't belong,
And orange where you would think it was wrong.
Use pink for people and purple for pants,
Brown for the ground,
And one time,
Just this one time,
I made the grass blue,
And the clouds green.
That made me laugh,
Because this world was that page,
And that page was mine.
I crossed and I scribbled all over the lines.
And when I was finish I’d go running to tell what I’d done.
My father would look and say
“Wow!”
“That’s beautiful son.”
And then my exhibit of art
Would hang neatly from the refrigerator door.
But that
does not
happen
any
more
I grew older.
And as time passed,
the lines grew to be guidelines and laws.
Rules began to apply, I did abide.
My right to be free was strictly denied.
Each stroke of a color, each stroke of a pen!
When would my hand dance freely again?
I learned of letters from A to Z,
In love with language I won spelling bees,
Put consonants with vowels to make words,
Learned adjectives, verbs, nouns, and adverbs.
I was a proud little nerd,
And I still felt this deep discontentment.
An egg hatched and I was not yet a bird.
Where was the wind beneath my wings,
to give me a feeling fly enough to make me sing?
I began to fall.
Fall fast into the depth of misunderstanding.
If knowledge is power,
Why were my heart and soul disbanding?
In frustration I sat in contemplation,
Pondering thoughts and memories,
of when I was most happy.
Looking through old picture books I found a folded piece of paper with the only solution to my problem.
The page had my name at the bottom.
Lines danced and trapeze from one side of the page to the other.
No sense,
No order,
Just ink.
I understood with a smile,
I hung that picture on my bedroom wall,
I opened a book and held a pen.
On lined paper I put line after line with occasional rhyme.
I used letters to laminate life.
I used words to take flight.
I used sentences to draw dreams.
I used what I knew and what I had seen.
Words are wisdom, what wisdom gains value when not shared with what we know as the world.
So when playing with ink, understand to be free,
understand your responsibility to others when they see what you have created in secrecy, and let there be no limit to what you think is outside that box.
That is how you dabble with ink.
