Without considering popular demand at all

What follows are a few poems from my college years. That comes off as an apology no matter how I phrase it. It's not. Despite being as puerile as baby powder, there's something intriguing in the haphazard assemblage of a painfully adolescent mind. Then again, I'm not including the absolute worst offenders. Eh.

"When I feel alive"

This is when I feel alive--
   when the Sun is going down
and the clouds have donned their fiery caps
ablaze with the pinks and purples of clowns--

with her right by my side
and no one else around
  I hear the sounds, the songs,
I see something as the sunlight
crooks a finger towards the night--

here now, just before all the colors fray
before the green is just another shade of gray
when the sky is blue and bleeding pleas to stay
that is when I feel alive--
just before I fade

"Lonely silent"

in the darkness I sit
and murmur at the wind whistling
in from out my window

i tell it my dreams and wishes
to be carried far from where
i sit worrying about the sunrise

the wind grows silent as my voice
quiets and the moon swallows
the air in a giant breath

i sit alone in darkness
and in silence ponder fear--
the fear of lingering, lonely silent death

Bonus -- An Essay

You can call it style, or voice or the finger of god but every person has his or her own way of saying something. The trick to writing is that not everyone is saying anything in a way worth paying attention. A writer is not only someone who knows himself better than others know themselves, he knows them just as well.

A Single Shot, No Chaser -- 10/3/2012

What is this? A post on WTMCF that doesn't involve League of Legends at all except for the fact that I just mentioned it? What could this mean? Is the writer ever going to stop asking rhetorical questions? Just how stupid does he think I am? When did this become a post-existential referendum on the nature of reality? Just now? Or then?

How much fun was that to read? I'm doing it again, aren't I? But the point remains. Creative, original, derivative or boring, experimental introductions and experimental novels run through the gamut of literary practice, and few ever succeed. Yet people keep on writing them and if the resulting work is well-publicized and wins a few awards through nepotism, shilling, and shameless bribery, it could even be honored with a Genius Grant or some other ridiculous distinction of merit that "My Immortal" will never achieve.

More than likely the end result will end up never being part of high school students subjected to the most horrifying experience any nefarious teacher could inflict on his or her unsuspecting wards: reading good books.

You would expect that after two hundred words I would have managed to put together some sort of coherent thesis, but this post was inspired by something I read over at Cracked, and I'm still somewhat shell-shocked by the depth of ignorance one of my favorite Cracked writers displayed. In fact, before you continue reading, you should go check it out. I'll still be here when you get done. Unless you get caught in the evil Cracked trap of clicking the related links at the bottom of the page. I did that once and it took every ounce of my being and the assistance of Chuck Norris riding a dinosaur to escape from that never-ending morass of comedy.