Well lookee what OMS found...

Apparently, your favorite blogger wanted to write a poetry book. This, according to a word document saved and titled back in ought-four as "Leaving Logan: A collection of crappy poetry and unfulfilled dreams."

INTRODUCTION: Dave Matthews inspired me during the summer of 1996. I was 21, relatively happy and, most of the time, drunk with my frat hat on backwards. I hadn’t yet realized what love could be, nor had I yet realized what it meant to truly fuck it up.

So I listened, really listened, to Dave for the first time that summer eight years ago. It was right before my senior year of college. I’d already been elected president of the aforementioned frat, thus cementing my ego at the time as bloated.

I remember sitting at my parents’ pool outside on a hazy July day. It was the first time I decided to write poetry since I got an A in a high school poetry class five years earlier (and a long time between 16 and 21). To wit, me at 16:

Seductive, suggestive eyes
Like an owl in the deep, dark forest
She sits perched, her fluffy, full chest heaving
She peers pulsating at her prey

Hapless, hopeless eyes
The prey falls in the deep, dark forest
He cries in pain, his pulse heaving
He is haunted, hurt by the owl.

It was those seductive, suggestive eyes.

Part of me thinks my game at age 16 was a hell of a lot better than at 21, mostly because I was five years removed from the impressionable frat boy that I’d become. It was the summer of “Crash Into Me,” of “You’ve got your ball, you’ve got your chain, tied to me, tied, tight, tie me up again…”

It was the summer, for me, at least, of Miller Lite, daily daydreams poolside and one song in particular that inspired me to write more poetry over the next few months, and then, eight years. That song was #41: “Remember when, we used to play for all the loneliness that nobody notices now.”

I’m the loner type now. I was then, too. Always comfortable with standing in the shadows and longing for the spotlight, yet, never, ever, stepping into it. It was easier to drink and hide in my journals.

I wrote some shitty poetry, then. Hell, critics will probably say the same about the collection contained herein, should it ever be published (and probably long after I die the tragic death of a melodramatic loner, probably death by a drunk driver – oh the irony; or death by growing old, vacant and unfulfilled – oh the drama).

So in June of ’96, I wrote rhyming shit like this:

Took a walk outside this afternoon
Drops of sweat seal my fate in June
Heat and misery take me away
Far away from here I’ll stay

I don’t get me either.

I will say this, though. As I approach 30, 13 months from now but who counts to 30 besides every other quarter-life crisis Reality TV generation wannabe rock star?

Anyway, as I approach 30, I realize that much of the senseless shit that I wrote, lamented and dreamed about is a catalog of a boy turned frat boy turned lover turned cheater turned jaded lover turned “Start over, then repeater” turned God will I ever learn learner turned hey, maybe I’m not so crazy afterall mature man who still gets carded at bars but is generally sane.

The early shit rhymes too much. But like I said, blame Dave.

Brief Table of Contents

Dreaming Frat Boy Finds Real Love … p.
Real World but not the one on MTV … p.
Oops with the cheating … p.
Leaving Logan … p.
Moving On … p.
Starting Over, again …p.
Grandpop …p.
First True Love …p.
Wandering, healthy eyes … p.
Don’t fuck it up because they did … p.