Hey y’all! It’s been a while since I did some poetry inspired by book titles, but I was feeling the need for something other and creative today. This allowed me to let me thoughts flow and wander, and it felt really nice. Below is what I came up with, based on all the books I’ve DNF’d over the years. I took disappointment and made it pride.
Six, mother knows best
Happy dreams
For peculiar children
No need to make friends with the dark
the wolf undercover
bleaker
darker
You never told me
Life is about the ridiculous
The job
The paid sounds
What you told me was mostly true
like me, looking for zen
like me, in love
like me, after the break up
like me, the collective madness
like me, gone
the risk of the end
becomes the wolf at the end
a memorial, an inheritance
i, lucifer allegiant
friend of crows and the dead
My take
I ended up going fairly dark with this one, which I feel like has happened before too. I guess that’s why artists are so often making dark, grim material even when they’re cheerful, happy people. There’s something a bit compelling about it, no?
Anyway, my read on this is a person who starts off as a child unknowing of the darkness in the world and themselves (the wolf). As they age, they learn more and more of that darkness. Their innocence and belief in the good is slowly stripped away, by the mundane (the job) and the depressing (the paid sounds… *ahem*). Looking for love and finding it, only to have it lost is what pushes this person over. Life doesn’t matter after that, and instead of a distant thought, death is staring in the face. Life passes by, life doesn’t matter. Death ends with the things left behind (memorial, inheritance) and moves to their presence in the next world.
I didn’t realize this until reading back through it now and thinking a few times, but I didn’t want to use punctuation to allow it to flow like thoughts, almost stream-of-consciousness like. I don’t want there to be barriers as we’re carried through this life. The capitalization matters too. When things are seeming okay, correct, straightforward, rules are followed, because that’s the right thing to do, no? Capitalize letters, live life the correct way. Once that all starts to slide away, once the darkness creeps in, capitalization is tossed away because what the fuck does that even matter. A listless ambivalence, a kind of lethargy, descends and ends the poem.
The books
Below are the books I used titles for in the making of this poem. Some of them I only used pieces of, or used with a few added words of my own, or mixed them up, and so on.
My Book Joy 
2 thoughts on “Spine Poetry: Books I Gave Up On”