To Dance Slowly in a Thunderstorm

So college was pretty much free verse. Any rhyme scheme I danced to was typically lost during a night of debauchery. I eventually mellowed to a point (a caesura of sorts) and lay in an iambic bed, predictable and safe—no less trying, of course, but ultimately not for me. For a time I lived something I coined “iambic free verse.” A life of rigid abandon. Rules without rules. I’ve no idea if such a thing really exists—I am far too busy to Google it. But I love(d) the very idea of it and it seemed to suit me. The manner in which I flouted the rules became a rule unto itself. I took the misnomer and rode it like a one-night-stand that elected to stick around. The act was rarely pretty, but generally satisfying. It was akin to being the love child of Walt Whitman and Raymond Carver. (And the inaccuracy of that simile delights me as it may cause people to pretend to think. Love child of Walt Whitman and Raymond Carver? Weren’t they each their own lovechild?) Indeed and well so. But still, it is my simile and I’m buying into it. A grandiose minimalist I am.

I think it was junior year. After a mutual night class, I huddled with a young student beneath an overhang at Butler Hall during a vicious thunderstorm. Vicious even by my standards. I held her tight as the night erupted and bellowed. As it sprayed and threatened us. Had I been alone I would have moved to the concrete quad and struck a Christ pose. “Show me what you got!” I would have screamed. Because I loved (and love) a thunderstorm. And when you are 20, you have never been so full of piss and vinegar. Until you are 23 and you realize that you know everything there is to know. And then maybe again at 30. But I wasn’t alone and so I held this young frightened girl. And with each lightning strike and each roll of thunder, she clung to me tighter. And I let her. And I held her. And she fell in unfortunate love. We dated for a few weeks and she got hurt. I choose these free verse words carefully. She got hurt versus I hurt her. Both are accurate. In those days, part of my game was the non-game of unadulterated honesty. I don’t date. I won’t call you. But we should go out and have fun. She was young and beautiful and had eyes made of cobalt. She lacked the ability to distance herself—the ability that I had by then mastered and that has since become my curse. And as I say, she got hurt. That was nearly 18 years ago. We were children really. Truth be told, we are children still. I doubt the girl with cobalt eyes even recalls my name. But I would wager that not a thunderstorm passes without her recalling somewhere in the crevasses of her memory a rapscallion of years ago holding her tightly in the doorway of the campus’s English hall.

For me, when it thunders I think aloud. I have not published a poem in six years. I have not written a publishable poem in seven. And I start a non-rhyme in my head.

I have to smirk at myself for applying—metaphorically or not—the notion of free verse to a style of life. Is not freedom from form indeed a form in and of itself? The philosophical cliché, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice? Of course it is. The boundaries may be a bit blurred but they do exist. They are what prevent us from entering total Chaos. This is hardly original thinking and is likely little beyond high school psychology. Nevertheless, it occupies my mind and as such I am thankful for the company.

And so the middle years—like college—appear too to be free verse. My rhyme scheme is internal and I slow dance to the cadence of my own voice. (What is that static?) I slow dance on the vaporous trails of a fine cigar, on the drifting burn of a good whiskey, on the occasional drum roll of thunder and spitfire of night lightning. Sometimes, if the verse is right and it meanders along in total silence—a back roads drive on a cool Tennessee night—I slow dance to nothing at all, as if no one were watching.

The freedom granted by free verse is utterly maddening to purists, those sticklers for form. But to my thinking, the possibilities are endless because the restrictions are entirely self-imposed. And discipline comes from a proper sense of self.

But freefalling back to reality, free verse of the soul exists only in the abstract. We know all to well that restrictions can never be entirely self-imposed. But, oh what a Goddamn lovely thought. In theory. In theory only.

But for now, for my selfish purposes, a man can pen a post, an article, a novel, a script, and use the word “free” too many times to count. Can use it with abandon, let’s say. He can void all segues and touch upon literary masters, youthful indiscretion, self-pity. He can free associate. Bastardize a poetic form (criticize another). He can dance and pretend to make love in a thunderstorm.

He can do all these things and more.

Or can he?