Great....another blog post....

I know what most of you are probably thinking:

"Wow, this kid must be so incredibly bored over there in England if all he does is sit around and write these ridiculous blog posts. I'm sick of reading them, I'm sick of his lame humor, and I'm sick of all these emails clogging up my inbox..."

"Well," I say to those of you who might feel this way, "hold on just a moment."

(I'm going to discontinue the use of quotation marks from this point forward because I will be the only one speaking. I've hypothetically muted you all.)

When I originally started this blog, the intent was for me to put up some of the fruits of my writing labors (for your dismay or enjoyment). So far, I really haven't done that. The time, however, is now. In the words of Loren Eiseley (have you noticed how much I like to quote him?), "the nothing looked out upon the nothing and was not pleased." So let there be poetry!

The poem below is a semi-revised version of one that I've been working on over the past two weeks. Originally, it was a very serious piece. My tutor, however, thought it was quite funny (he has a lovely British sense of humor...) and recommended that I make some pointed revisions. At first, I was a bit dismayed that my tutor was compelling me to rip up a beautiful descriptive poem that meant quite a lot to me, but the revision turned out to be, in his words, "quite droll." The gangly teenager of a poem that you see before you portrays an interaction between a man and a woman (or a boy and a girl, however you want to look at it) and reveals some of the potential dangers of asking vague questions to the average male. Ladies...take notes.

A Portrait
Eric Kozlik

I. “What do I look like?” she asked,

So in his mind, he created a picture of lines,
modest boxes, and gentle planes—
nothing extravagant, you see, just a feathering…

He leaned back, deep in thought, to color it
with the pale whip-dart of gold, hair splayed acutely
on a neck that burned with the slightest pinkening of blood,

And it became a soft and half-refracted image, flowing,
and bending the future into close-fitting lines on her palms,
and they were very simple lines until they tripped out of his mouth.

II. “This is what you look like,” he replied,

And she smiled, sweetly, as the first word got lodged
somewhere between the conscience and the uvula
and came rattling like a tin can across his tongue…

He scribbled, and erased, and left a bluish smudge
right down the middle of her lopsided face, and a gap
between her two slightly crooked front teeth.

So just as he opened his mouth, raising his fell pencil
for another go at her, she stayed his hand and his lips—
“you really do have such a way with words,” she said.

**************************************************************

And so The Wandering Wordsmith has finally smithed some words. "Congratulations," you think, "would he like a cookie? Perhaps a nice pat on the back?" (I've decided to unmute you because I enjoy this hypothetical and hyperbolically antagonistic inner dialogue).

My response: "Although he does enjoy cookies and will accept the odd pat on the back from time to time, the Wandering Wordsmith has made it his policy to accept congratulations (even hypothetical and sarcastic ones) solely in the form of pounds sterling."

"Why do I even bother with people like this?" you think.

The Wandering Wordsmith cannot answer this question.

On a more serious note, I just booked a flight to France for spring break. I'll be flying, along with one of my housemates, Dan, from London to Lourdes at the end of March. We'll be spending a week hiking in the Pyrenees and visiting Bordeaux and Paris via the TGV, France's high speed train. There will CERTAINLY be more to come concerning this trip as the time draws nearer.

However, I have some writing to do today and a Bath Rugby match to attend tomorrow afternoon, so I shall hang up my blogging pen for the moment and very likely get back to you all by the end of this coming week.

No hard feelings about that hypothetical conversation, right?

-The Wandering Wordsmith