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A Sour Place
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Literature Text
A Sour Place
There are places in this world,
Where hope has gone sour,
And nothing seems to properly fit,
I knew such a place,
In seventh and eighth grade,
The old brick school with the musical pit.
Next door to a rubber plant,
It perched on the side of a hill,
Like the bag on a peddler's back,
I remember how nothing,
Ever felt completely real there,
And even time seemed slightly out of whack.
It was a dull and ugly building,
Shaped like a reversed and squared letter 'C'
Rebuilt from the ashes of an older school.
A bastard conglomeration,
Of 1890s and 1970s,
Which was worn-out the day it was renewed.
The previous school,
Had been put to the flames,
And its memories offered to the sky,
By a crazed church organist,
Who watched from a nearby rooftop,
And exercised the cliché of laughing 'til he cried.
And even a decade later,
When I arrived within its rebuilt walls,
The scars were still plain to see,
And the remains of crumbling bricks,
From older walls offered to the fire,
Littered the inside of the reversed 'C',
The first year I attended
Spring was late in coming,
Winter fought to the very last day.
The grounds were a slippery battlefield,
Of mud, slush and snow,
Where the only colours were white, brown and grey.
One day on the hillside,
When the first specks of green were finally returning,
Small toads began to emerge.
And my moment of wonderment,
At the resilience of Nature,
Turned to a hard lesson about inhumanity's most basic urge.
Some nearby kids saw what I was looking at,
And came to see for themselves,
What had caught the fat, geeky loser's attention,
The coolest boy of the bunch,
Cast his predatory gaze at the small, hopping toads,
And with a one-sided smirk, he commanded:
"Kill them!"
My fate and reputation,
Were sealed on that day,
I couldn't have made a bigger mistake if I'd tried:
Because as the merciless slaughter began,
I looked back at the cool kids,
And I asked the single-word question: "why?"
My impertinent query was answered,
By a fist in the face,
And a shove down the muddy and slushy hill,
And the cool kids' annoyance,
That I'd momentarily paused their important task,
And that I might have caused them to miss a kill.
And for the next two years,
That I attended that school,
There's few memories I care to rewind,
Because I learned more on that hillside,
On that early Spring day,
Than from every teacher in every classroom combined.
There are places in this world,
Where hope has gone sour,
And nothing seems to properly fit,
I knew such a place,
In seventh and eighth grade,
The old brick school with the musical pit.
Next door to a rubber plant,
It perched on the side of a hill,
Like the bag on a peddler's back,
I remember how nothing,
Ever felt completely real there,
And even time seemed slightly out of whack.
It was a dull and ugly building,
Shaped like a reversed and squared letter 'C'
Rebuilt from the ashes of an older school.
A bastard conglomeration,
Of 1890s and 1970s,
Which was worn-out the day it was renewed.
The previous school,
Had been put to the flames,
And its memories offered to the sky,
By a crazed church organist,
Who watched from a nearby rooftop,
And exercised the cliché of laughing 'til he cried.
And even a decade later,
When I arrived within its rebuilt walls,
The scars were still plain to see,
And the remains of crumbling bricks,
From older walls offered to the fire,
Littered the inside of the reversed 'C',
The first year I attended
Spring was late in coming,
Winter fought to the very last day.
The grounds were a slippery battlefield,
Of mud, slush and snow,
Where the only colours were white, brown and grey.
One day on the hillside,
When the first specks of green were finally returning,
Small toads began to emerge.
And my moment of wonderment,
At the resilience of Nature,
Turned to a hard lesson about inhumanity's most basic urge.
Some nearby kids saw what I was looking at,
And came to see for themselves,
What had caught the fat, geeky loser's attention,
The coolest boy of the bunch,
Cast his predatory gaze at the small, hopping toads,
And with a one-sided smirk, he commanded:
"Kill them!"
My fate and reputation,
Were sealed on that day,
I couldn't have made a bigger mistake if I'd tried:
Because as the merciless slaughter began,
I looked back at the cool kids,
And I asked the single-word question: "why?"
My impertinent query was answered,
By a fist in the face,
And a shove down the muddy and slushy hill,
And the cool kids' annoyance,
That I'd momentarily paused their important task,
And that I might have caused them to miss a kill.
And for the next two years,
That I attended that school,
There's few memories I care to rewind,
Because I learned more on that hillside,
On that early Spring day,
Than from every teacher in every classroom combined.
Those, who have read enough of my poetry, have likely seen me mention my so-called 'burn-pile' more than once. If you haven't, the quickest explanation I can offer is that it's my literary and poetic equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys.
Essentially, every poem I have tried to write over the years, which simply doesn't come together the way I wanted it to, or which turns to a steaming pile of shit in my hands, is sent there. Very, very occasionally, I might be able to rescue a piece or a fragment years later, and use it somewhere else, but well over 90% of the ideas I've sent there over the years still remain there.
This is a very rare case of one of the very oldest and unloved fragments suddenly becoming useful. Indeed it is one of the oldest that I had on the burn pile, as it had been sitting there, getting rusty and having weeds grow up through its cracks since late 1984.
It refers to an incident that I witnessed earlier that year, which is probably one of the most painful childhood memories that I have. Indeed, the passage of almost thirty years had mostly worn off the edges and dulled how painful it really was at the time, and the very act of picking it up and dusting it off caused the proverbial faded sepia tones to suddenly return to Vistavision Technicolor, and to rediscover that underneath all the rust and dirt, the edges were still sharp and keen.
What spawned the resurgence of this particular memory was a conversation I recently had with my younger brother, when he told me that the school, where I had attended seventh and eighth grades between 1983 and 1985 had been closed down and condemned in late 2007, and was currently in the process of being gutted and turned into condominiums after having sat empty for a little over four years.
This sparked enough morbid interest that I searched and found an urban explorers' website, where several individuals had gained entry to the abandoned building, and had taken photos of the place now mostly trashed, covered with gang graffiti, and with ice in the hallways.
Looking at those images, I had a sick feeling in my guts, as if I was suddenly seeing that place revealed as it truly was, even when I attended it in so-called "happier" days. I realised that, out of all the schools I had ever attended, I had the fewest truly good and pleasant memories from this one.
That brought up further memories of how in the months after the incident, which spawned the oldest parts of this poem, I had been reading Stephen King's book: 'Pet Sematary', and one particular idea had stuck with me. At a certain place in the book, the old man, who has become a mentor to the protagonist, and who first tells him about the pet cemetery behind his property, talks about how some places just become "sour" - how bad memories and negativity can build up to the point, where they never leave.
Looking at the ruins of that building, and suddenly having those old memories of it become vivid for me once again made me realise that for me at least, that school was indeed a sour place.
Essentially, every poem I have tried to write over the years, which simply doesn't come together the way I wanted it to, or which turns to a steaming pile of shit in my hands, is sent there. Very, very occasionally, I might be able to rescue a piece or a fragment years later, and use it somewhere else, but well over 90% of the ideas I've sent there over the years still remain there.
This is a very rare case of one of the very oldest and unloved fragments suddenly becoming useful. Indeed it is one of the oldest that I had on the burn pile, as it had been sitting there, getting rusty and having weeds grow up through its cracks since late 1984.
It refers to an incident that I witnessed earlier that year, which is probably one of the most painful childhood memories that I have. Indeed, the passage of almost thirty years had mostly worn off the edges and dulled how painful it really was at the time, and the very act of picking it up and dusting it off caused the proverbial faded sepia tones to suddenly return to Vistavision Technicolor, and to rediscover that underneath all the rust and dirt, the edges were still sharp and keen.
What spawned the resurgence of this particular memory was a conversation I recently had with my younger brother, when he told me that the school, where I had attended seventh and eighth grades between 1983 and 1985 had been closed down and condemned in late 2007, and was currently in the process of being gutted and turned into condominiums after having sat empty for a little over four years.
This sparked enough morbid interest that I searched and found an urban explorers' website, where several individuals had gained entry to the abandoned building, and had taken photos of the place now mostly trashed, covered with gang graffiti, and with ice in the hallways.
Looking at those images, I had a sick feeling in my guts, as if I was suddenly seeing that place revealed as it truly was, even when I attended it in so-called "happier" days. I realised that, out of all the schools I had ever attended, I had the fewest truly good and pleasant memories from this one.
That brought up further memories of how in the months after the incident, which spawned the oldest parts of this poem, I had been reading Stephen King's book: 'Pet Sematary', and one particular idea had stuck with me. At a certain place in the book, the old man, who has become a mentor to the protagonist, and who first tells him about the pet cemetery behind his property, talks about how some places just become "sour" - how bad memories and negativity can build up to the point, where they never leave.
Looking at the ruins of that building, and suddenly having those old memories of it become vivid for me once again made me realise that for me at least, that school was indeed a sour place.
© 2013 - 2024 WotanTyger
Comments5
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This is spectacularly haunting! When I was younger, I always had a heart for the animals who nobody liked... Tree frogs, toads, potato bugs, snails and worms. I was always the weird girl for protecting them. But to this day I am proud of what I did! Good job bringing back memories!