It is especially nice to be appreciated by your own family. For one of his film class projects, my son Jimmy in Arlington chose to do a spoken word reading of one my poems from my Ironweed collection: "What I've Done" and illustrate it with a slideshow of his outstanding East Texas photography.
Cool. I didn't even know he read my stuff.
Here's the text:
What I've Done
by Jolie Blond (that's me)
06/08/04
What I've done,
I've done:
youthful pranks
and pointless desecrations,
sometimes from malice
sometimes for fun.
Isn't it strange
so many years later
sitting in this room
deranged,
derailed,
failed,
wondering where
I was snared
by bad decisions,
poor choices---
and if I could've
better fared
listening
to other voices,
wondering
if I should've been out
plundering career
instead of
adventure.
Isn't it queer
sitting here in fear
of the past's
retributions?
I won
most of the battles
I had begun:
I burned bridges,
slashed communications
isolated relations,
fought from ditches
and burned the witches.
I engineered all kinds of disaster
for those who crowned themself
my master.
I've still got things to do.
I can't be looking back
at the ruins of
battlefields past.
There are other battles
to be won
and what I've
already done,
I've done.
Tags: poetry, poem, my prose, what I've done, film school project, viral video, amateur video, unusual video, photography, cajunasian, jarvis, spoken word reading, pointless desecrations, deranged, derailed, bad decisions, other voices
I really like hearing Jimmy read this... first time I've heard his voice and he sounds so much like you. It's very good....
ReplyDeleteThanks Mel. He's so much like me it's scary. Especially the wunderlust part.
ReplyDelete