A Foolish Figure

According to my records, this is the first thing I wrote in 2001, and I wrote it on my own initiative.  It may have dated around the  time that my dad and I had a little fight over Spiders, and their place in the world.  My reaction to the spider is very simple:  KILL KILL KILL!  My father's reaction to the spider is also very simple:  OBSERVE OBSERVE OBSERVE!  (You know, that just doesn't have the same force as kill kill kill...but I will let it stay to preserve parallelism.)  My dad will leave spiderwebs in the weirdest places because he thinks the spiders are absolutely fascinating--including in the house.  He would scold me if I killed spiders IN THE HOUSE!  Anyway, we made a deal that I would never kill spiders outside the house, and he would never give me a hard time (i.e. throw spiders at me...yes...he did threaten to do that...).  I have held to my side of the bargain ever since.

Anyway,  I don't know if that's why I wrote this poem, but I did write it. 

I don't know when I actually began to grasp the concept of meter.  I certainly knew iambic, trochaic, dactyllic, and anapestic even in seventh grade, but as this poem shows, I wasn't able to apply the concept to real life.  Oh well.

I'm just going to finish out 2000 in one swell foop, because I looked at the stories that I had written in the first half of 8th grade and they were all...weird.  Really weird.  The first two are titled "character sketches."  I have the vaguest memory of them, but I don't really know what it was all about.

The names are really funny to me.  Actually, all the names in my old stories.  I loved names.  Even now I have a very long list of the names that I will name my children, provided whoever I marry likes them (the names, not the children) and I actually want to bear...fifteen children.

Yeah.  SO not happening.

Anyway, I really love names, but I used to like really strange ones. All I can say is I really labored over those names.  :-)

So, here we have Character Sketch number one.  I suspect it to be based on a fable.

( The Horses )

Some of my creative writing was inspired by my own fevered brain.  Some of my creative writing was inspired by a desire to get an "A" on an assignment.  This poem falls into the latter category.   I bet you can't guess what the assignment was:

( Mr. Bumble )

I don't know if I got an A.  I'm guessing so, because teachers are nice when it comes to creative writing.  Well, my teacher was.