So I continue to settle into my new home. The library/spare room is starting to look livable and both the lemon trees survived their transition. I’m slow to settle by nature, as the books take a lot of unpacking and sorting. Having one BA in History and another in English Literature makes for a lot of hardbacks.
My art and swords are hung and I’m finally ready to go through that last box of old poetry. If I ever need to feel better about my writing all I have to do is pop open some of that stuff. Never I think was there a more angsty teenager than I had been. That’s some bad stuff handscrawled on legal pad (I was still using lined paper then). And though angsty, I was a prolific young fellow.
A funny story with some not so funny outcomes is what happened the last time I sorted. I tossed out enough of stuff to fill a dumpster and the next morning it was gone. In the night, people had come through the alley to take it all away. I say people because this was not a one person job. I had been careful and frankly a home shredder wasn’t going to do the trick but I must have missed one copy of an account number somewhere along the way. A month or two later, poof, someone attempted to put a pretty big check against my bank account with a really old address. And all that time I’d been thinking they were just reading my old stuff for some low quality entertainment!
Who takes that much work and goes through it for information? I was a pretty tortured kid, most of it self inflicted. Sure they got a bank account out of it, but I hope the bad poetry at least stung them a little. My bank caught the check and now I’m all freshly accounted but I keep thinking about that old, bad poetry. It’s still out there, circling, inflicting badly written angst on casual eyes. It’s like toxic word waste lying about, emitting background melodrama into a perfectly filthy alley. Even worse, people who stumble into this sticky emotional floatsm won’t know who is responsible as none of it is signed. They’ll curse my anyonymity even as they try to wipe the green goo of teen heartache from their shoe. Next time it’s shred and recycle for the safety of us all.