Rumpelstiltskin

When I was in school, a friend of mine wrote a beautiful poem about loneliness. It was good enough to get published in the school annual magazine. I was quite the illiterate child at the time.. I didn't know kids wrote poetry too.

So here was an opportunity to present to the world my "excellent command over the language" as one of my English teachers put it, while justifying why I hadn't failed despite answering every question wrong in the Comprehension section. I was great at essays it seemed, but could I be great at poetry too? I just had to try.

So I wrote a poem about a visit to the zoo. You can never be too young (or too old) for a visit to the zoo. Now I wrote this based on what I had watched on the Discovery channel; I had never actually visited a zoo before then. So my zoo had the most bizarre animals, birds and fish, most of which I didn't catch sight of at the Byculla zoo when I finally went. Nonetheless my poem was published in the mag the following year, so my mission was accomplished. I've never looked back since, though I have always had a niggling suspicion that I'm not very good at poetry.

I even went where no contemporary poet had gone before. I don't know what possessed me to get into "epic poetry" (based on my favourite fairy tales). Well, the epicness was only in length. I first wrote a never ending poem on Cinderella, followed by an even longer one on Rumpelstiltskin, after which I ran out of steam and the world was spared any further epic stuff from me. Ask me why I chose to write the first one, I'll tell you it's my all-time favourite story. But Rumpelstiltskin? If there even was a reason why I took this self given assignment on, it is now lost among my many moments of insanity. These were handwritten back then and I have no patience to inflict them on the internet (yet). Did I just hear a whoop?

Then there was this miserable I've-never-had-a-boyfriend phase, when I wrote poems by the dozen. In those days I had an incredible number of crushes, because I was stupid and in college, which is a terrible combination. So poem after broody poem spewed out of horrific heartbreak and the non-achievement of being single.

Perhaps it was for this very reason that once I finally got into a relationship, life never let me be single for too long in between. I have had a few, nearly break-less, relationships before Fatty conned me into marrying him. In retrospect, this seems to have been nature's final solution; I haven't written poems of hopeless heartbreak since well over a decade. It is another story altogether that I haven't written much during said decade.

My poetry has recently turned morbid though. I don't know why but before I can stop myself, whatever I end up writing comes out quite morbidly. I wonder if there's a psychological connection and I'm actually messing with people I can because I can't mess with people I actually want to.

- R for Rumpelstiltskin (My A to Z Challenge)