More Poems!

So, here are some more poems from my 12-poem collection I wrote for poetry class--the collection is called "Birth (of worlds and otherwise)". The first is titled "Go, Speed Racer, Go," and was written as a response to the movie Speed Racer. Speed Racer is one of the greatest movies of all time, and if you do not like, you are dumb.
The second is called "Meditating on Freedom," and was written while... actually, the title is pretty self-explanatory. Enjoy!

Go, Speed Racer, Go.

Good and evil, locked in conflict:

And there’s racing, too.

Jump-jacks and flying kicks and tire shanks,

And cheaters don’t always get caught,

Because “it’s hard to see what goes on inside of those dust clouds.”

But no matter:

Speed will win, in the end: and all will agree that this is

Right and

True and

Good.

So the white car finishes first, and neither crowd nor camera
Cares about the rest.

Because light has defeated dark,

And the dark goes to prison, because

“Cheaters never prosper.” 

And after watching, you may think

That there’s something strange and incredible about

            How the red and white of the finish line

            Never mix into pink, and how

            The checkered flag never turns gray.

Meditating on Freedom

Would you be free?

There is freedom everywhere.

            In rising and in falling,

                        In living and in dying

There is freedom.

You cannot escape it.

 And to the one who conquers, a new name will be given.

            But only to the one who conquers.

You are free indeed:

Free to be a hero or villain,

Free to leave or free to go,

            Free to try, and to fail

Or succeed.

You cannot escape it.

And each will be judged according to his deeds.

This is why freedom is frightening.

This is freedom:

To fight and win, or die

            In the fighting, and win anyway.

                        To fight against even yourself,

Like the two arms of a cross,

And to receive the victor’s crown.

Freedom is the voice that says, “Well done,” when

            You could have done otherwise.

It was like when someone dies

So, I have been really busy with my now-26,000 word thesis project, a first-person story centered on Peter. It's almost done, and I'll probably post excerpts from it here eventually. If you want to read the whole thing, let me know. Anyway: this semester I took a poetry class. It's been pretty fun, and I've written several poems, some of which I like. Here is the latest one I've written, composed earlier today for class.

It was like when someone dies,

And how one second they’re alive,

And the next they’re dead,

And it’s hard to tell the difference at first,

Because they don’t look very different—

A little too pale, maybe, but that’s it.

That’s what it was like,

Except in reverse,

Because one moment the world was dead,

Filled with skeletons pretending they were alive,

Prancing in the stale light

Of the dead sun, and there was nothing new, and

Everything under the sun was old

And dead.

And they chased after a dead wind on a long journey leading

nowhere.

And then the dead light of the sun

Shone, for the first time in millennia,

On Something new, and the sun was reborn.

And new Feet walked across the dead earth

And made it live again.

And then

For a moment

There was a dead hill and a dead tomb

At the center of everything.

But then the tomb was empty. And everything was new,

And some of the skeletons grew flesh and were no longer skeletons.

They danced in the new light of the sun.

But most of the skeletons did not even notice,

Because they were still pretending.

Only by now they had forgotten

that they were, after all, only pretending.

It was like when someone dies,

And you only notice when you realize

That they haven’t taken a breath for a while.

That’s what this is like,

Except in reverse.