Joy Renee Juvenilia

Poem by Joy Renee age 14

An high school classmate (and friend) posted these on my fb wall today.  At first the embarrassment was jalapeno hot.  My first thought was to download them and then delete the posts off my wall before anyone else saw them.

But a minute or two of thought cooled me down and I saw that it was fitting in some ineffable way that this showed up like this just a month or two before my scheduled self-pub of my short story, Blow Me a Candy Kiss.  Ineffable does mean hard to put into words and yet I just tried for half an hour.  I give up.

Reading through it again I blush extravagantly at the silliness of this 14 year year old's angst.  Silly or not she was wiser than she knew.  The angst was born in her second guessing herself.  Her first instincts were true. That kid was Trouble with a capital T.

I find it interesting that I was using the poem format to tell a story.  I don't remember having any model for that at the time.  This was over thirty years before Ellen Hopkins popularized it with her YA novels Burned, Crank, Glass etc.

I'm feeling that itch about three inches behind my eyes that often signals the sprouting of a story that needs to boom and grow.  I wonder if I could sustain a story in the poem format for the length of a YA novel.

There's a story begun on those two pages.  There's a story behind that story.  Then there's a story behind how those pages ended up in the possession of that classmate.  A story which I still don't know.  The last time I saw those pages they were tucked inside my 8th grade yearbook.

But because they were in his possession (yes, his, yet another story) they survived while the twenty odd other pieces of my Juvenilia did not.

There is a tangle of stories attached to those two pages.  But  none of them are the one trying to sprout behind my eyes.  I'm not that into memoir.