A Dawn Like This Day’s

I’m ridiculously jealous of this guy right now.

Happy New Year, All.

I’m switching it up a bit this morning, the first “My Sunday Post” of 2021.

Part of this is because, like the rest of us, I am deflating from the holidays. So I’m tired and need an energy recharge.

But another reason actually is stronger - the desire to challenge myself right out of the gate in this new year. So, to do that, I could have tried to put together yet another standard post - which takes time and mental / emotional energy, certainly - or I could try something new that makes me decidedly nervous to do.

I chose the latter.

So today, it’s a quick story followed by a Big First for me - my first self-challenge of 2021.

Back in eighth grade in Southern California, my burgeoning teenage angst gravitated towards two things - music and girls (just like millions of other teenage boys the world over). They ended up getting most of my attention, alongside doing begrudging work on my studies and cheering on Magic Johnson and the “Showtime” L.A. Lakers. As the year went by, I became a quieter and quieter kid who spent more and more time in his room. Due to my difficulty with understanding and processing emotions, I began to dabble in doing some writing of my own, mainly in an attempt to jumpstart a process that would morph me into the Second Coming of Bono or Bob Dylan. I felt small, so I wanted to do something that would make me BIG, and that meant noticed and loved and famous.

But underneath that was really the desire to be Seen, to be Understood, to give Voice to all that was inside me that I desperately wanted to understand myself.

So I started trying my hand at poetry.

Unbeknownst to all my friends and family, I checked poetry books out of the library and read them late at night after everyone went to bed. I also read through the liner notes of every compact disc I could get my hands on, reading song lyrics the way linguists try to decipher a newly discovered dialect.

I was embarrassed to admit my interest because, A) liking poetry wasn’t very cool, and B) I wanted to be really good at it before I put it out into the world. I was terrified of my words being dismissed out of hand, or worse, laughed at. But I certainly read a lot of it on my own and liked the idea of being able to express myself with words that captured my own feelings and moved those of others.

And then, a middle school breakup intervened in my best laid plans.

Towards the end of that year, the girl I’d been “with” all year - who I absolutely adored - broke up with me publicly (at a Friday night class outing to a roller skating rink, for God’s sake. It could’ve been the opening scene of a John Hughes film). To add salt to that wound, she started dating one of my close friends in class - that same night.

Right in front of me. That sucked.

I spent the weekend devastated beyond words. So, in an effort to find some, I sat down on that Sunday night and began writing my first real poem - an (unrequited) love poem. I started scribbling ideas and lines and various words down on lined school paper, crumpling up page after page as each one failed to deliver the goods.

Finally, I started to get one going. I cannot remember now, for the life of me, what words were there or what I titled the thing, but I remember clearly it had five stanzas. It wasn’t finished by the time I went to bed that night, dreading the next day at school, but I remember feeling like I was on to something. It had words of pain, sadness, confusion, and anger, and it conjured up some emotional imagery I liked.

I was on my way to my first full poem. And then, I made what turned out to be a fateful mistake.

I took the damned thing to school with me.

The idea was maybe I could work on it at recess breaks or at lunch, when I already knew I wasn’t going to want to talk to anyone about anything. At various points during the morning, I worked on it surreptitiously while class was going on. My classmates, knowing I was wrecked and having eyes that functioned, saw that I was working on something intently and was not wanting to talk about it. And I refused to look at Her. It was obvious I was all over the place, and so in retrospect the attention I got for it should have warned me to protect my project at all costs.

I never should have let it out of my sight.

Instead, at one point towards the end of the day, I left it in my desk (it was one classroom per grade, so we had our own personal desks) to go use the bathroom. When I got back to the room a few minutes later, not only was my teacher not in the classroom, but one of my classmates (his name was Kevin the Asshole) was standing next to my open desk….

And reading my poem out loud to the class.

Flamboyantly. Hand-over-face-woe-is-me mockery in full force. Now I really didn’t like that guy and most the rest of the class didn’t either, so him doing that wasn’t nearly as bad as the reactions my classmates gave him.

They were laughing - first at him, then at me.

I don’t remember too much after that, other than he crumpled up the poem and threw it at me, and I picked it up and bolted from the classroom - right back to the bathroom, where I promptly threw up and flushed the balled up poem with it.

My teacher eventually found me and, from what I heard later, ripped Kevin and the class for what they’d done; I spent the rest of the hour before the end of school hiding out in the bathroom with my teacher’s permission.

Thus ended The Great Middle School Poetry Writing Experiment (or GMSPWE).

And the scars were real and deep. In high school, I turned even more inward and didn’t dare try to write out feelings of any kind, in verse or otherwise.

In college, when I played in cover bands for fun, I tried my hand at writing song lyrics, but was crippled by perfectionism and the abject fear of them not being good enough or laughed at. So, I mainly stuck with being in cover bands, and my dream of finding success in music as an original artist dried up in time, too.

Decades went by, and as they did I stuffed the emotions associated with the GMSPWE deep down along with everything else, and in time, all that crap came out sideways in increasingly self-destructive behavior. When that brought down my life around me and I started down the long road of rebuilding, a funny thing eventually happened.

I started reading poetry again.

It began when a dear friend introduced me to the poem, “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.

It floored me. Soon I had three of her anthologies, and I began to be the only person reading through the poetry section at Barnes and Noble.

Pair that with all the deep work I was doing on my emotions and rebuilding my life, and soon a crazy idea came back to me.

Maybe I could try writing poetry again?

It was still an unsettling idea, but it was no longer terrifying. And that told me a lot.

My first poem since eighth grade (a thirty year gap) was inspired by a singular rose that I passed every day on my walk to the local coffee shop to work on my book - it was behind a wrought iron gate so I couldn’t get close to it, but it was gorgeous and the imagery of something so beautiful being trapped behind bars gave me a few snippets of phrasing to start with. The poem that emerged was clunky and wordy in the final product, but the idea became the root of a short story that I wrote not long after (I’ll share it here sometime).

But, it was a poem. My poem. And it felt fantastic. So I wrote another one. Then another.

I didn’t share them with anybody - or even that I was writing them. That took longer. When I finally fessed up to it, it was to an extremely small group of cherished friends who were also writers. But I still didn’t let them read any. Right now, there are members of my family and a number of close friends who are learning all this for the first time.

But that’s about to change.

To date, I have written over twenty-five longer poems (all free verse - I can’t do rhyming at all except in the most basic Dr. Seuss sense), along with dozens of haikus. My process that goes from inspiration to finished product is very natural and open, and I don’t spend hours composing them or shaping them. They just sort of Arrive.

My muse(s) I still keep private, but I am proud of every one of my poems and the motives behind them, and the very few people I have actually shared them with have loved them. That’s gone a long way to building my confidence that I may actually be sorta okay at this poetry thing, and that sharing it publicly might be a good next step for me as a writer, and more importantly, as a healing Person.

So, here we are. It’s time.

For my first Big Challenge of 2021, here is the first poem I am ever putting out in public. I wrote it about two years ago, but I think it’s safe to say it represents the culmination of an idea - a need to write and express these types of things - that began in my most vulnerable years for the most powerful of reasons.

I chose this one to share because it seems ideal for the start of a new year, one that I hope will be full of peace, joy, and meaning for all of us. And, like my first poem, it’s five stanzas.

And Kevin, wherever you are? Piss off - no wait, I actually forgave you years ago. No, I didn’t. Did I?

I’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, I hope you like the poem. And if you don’t, maybe you will like the next one. Because more will be coming.

Back to original programming next week.

Chins Up, Everyone.

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A Dawn Like This Day’s

By JDK Wyneken

The dawn on a day like this one

Usually means more than most,

When people pause for some reason

Known fully only to them.

For some it’s reflection,

For others a new Day One of something

Maybe gratitude or a sigh of relief,

Or a determination to worry less and push forward more.

For me it’s to remind myself of Now:

The beauty of it. The quiet, the perfect

Tenor and tone of things

As they are.

Whatever it may bring, this dawn means New;

A new word in this particular sentence of Life,

A new line in a paragraph, a new page of a chapter,

A new opening of a scene, or the beginning of its end.

I, for one, love knowing that in This New

Your name is on my every page,

Just like every yesterday

And every tomorrow.