Little Boy Blue: A Poem
Little Boy Blue
This poem is something that I wrote for a young guy that I knew who had a trouble past and who was struggling to find his own identity through drug addiction and other problems. His favorite color was blue and his eyes were an intense blue. To form the poem, I took the lines from first part of the original nursery rhyme of the same name and then added my own words in measured sections. I inverted the form of the last section for a poetic twist.
Little Boy Blue
Sunburst sparkled ocean eyes
Filled with the sewage litter
Of the full of pain past
Suicidal tendencies repressed beneath
The mask of control and coolness that you
Desperately press upon your face
You want to pretend that
You know the inside of your soul
And further to pretend
That you like what you see there
Come blow your horn
A little harder in order to stir up
The desert storm necessary to
Sublimate the intensity of the emotions
You’d do anything not to feel
Beat your drum to drum out
The beating of your frightened heart
Tapotement touches across tight tones
Create music in every motion you make
In order to escape the cacophony of
Your symphonically screaming mind
The sheep’s in the meadow
Grazing among tranquility which
You try to emulate, claiming that
You don’t like melodrama
While simultaneously sucking it in to you
Sheep flocked at farms near schools
That nearly murdered you inside
Teaching you not to trust and not to love
Because you’d been forced away
Into a box you couldn’t fit inside
Because you’d ripped apart the box
They gave you to play with as a child
The cow’s in the corn
Contemplating the essence of the stalks
And you’re in your mind
Stalking the essence of contemplation
And then running when it comes your way
Thrashing violently in the light sleep nights
Your body contorts in memory
Your face screams silently
The demons you chase have turned to chase you
And you are devoured into waking
Forced again into a reality where
Comfort is constantly sought
And never lingers
Where is the little boy
Who used to play recklessly because
He wasn’t afraid of getting hurt?
And when did he relinquish his place
To a boy who pays recklessly
Because he wants to do the harming
Before the hurting hits him?
Where is the innocence of ignorance?
Where is the laughter of simplicity?
Where is the man the boy wants to be?
And who is this guy in between them?
Who looks after the sheep
When the gates are all crashed,
When the guardian of the heart has
Gone on his thirty minute lunch break
When the incognito emotions slip through the door
And the animals go running out wildly?
You listen to your mother and allow no attachments
Because by abandoning you,
She taught you about the pain they create
Pain pummels the poet’s path
The past plays games of reflection
And injection and manipulation and mutilation
Under the haystack
Of complication and corruption and chaos
Lie the obscure needles
Of connection and caress and caring
Little boys love to play in the mud
Grown men do the snow shoveling with age-old tools
And in between the adolescent
Insists upon his exemption
From the search for the needle
From the search for reality
From the search for the girl that
Spins the hay into gold
Little Boy Blue
The depth of you creates echoes
So harmonious
They could simplify society
The cultivation of you creates illusions
So realistic that they could become you
The soul of you beckons in
The mind of you
And begs to be released
And so you open your eyes
As wide as you can
And fall
Fast asleep
