High school "poem"

[steuard]

During my senior year of high school, my English teacher required us to submit a story or poem to the school's literary magazine From the Depths. I thought the assignment was silly (and was probably pretty dismissive of the magazine, too), so I wrote a "poem" over lunch and handed it in. To the great amusement of everyone who was in on the joke, they published it. At long last, I've tracked down a copy, and I'll share it with you here:

The Myth

as I followed the stream
    down
from the mountaintop of
    which it sprang,
I knew then that my hidden
    town
was littered with the broken
    shards
of ice

cold, and colder
in the frigid dawn
    the birds flee
to their inner sanctuaries
    filled
with nothing greater than
    the sea


accord
bubbling pipes
crying out in unison
calling to the specks
hidden deep in the folds
of a wretched soul

paradoxical musings
flow relentlessly into
vortices of confusion
and fear

the fragile cup
is emptied of its tepid
    draught

Comments

[steuard.livejournal.com]

The "joke" here is that it's a bunch of meaningless drivel. :) I mean, "the fragile cup is emptied of its tepid draught"? That phrase would be laughably over the top except that it has no significance whatsoever. (I'm actually kinda proud of it.)

If there were some overall unifying theme or message, that would be one thing, but I intentionally wrote it to make sure there wasn't one. The lack of capitalization and the odd line breaks and indentation are just pretentious nonsense.

Nevertheless, my former-English-major mother insists that there must be deep meaning in it regardless of whether I tried to include any or not. So maybe you're onto something.