Childhood Poems (Original Draft)

INTRODUCTION: Some early poems. I dug these out of an old rotting toychest in the basement. I've had nightmares about digging in that old rotting toychest. And take a look what I found. Not quite what I'd expected. I have two sets of these poems and will post them in two sections--the separate ones, which are all duplicates of the other set and appear to be earlier drafts, and then the fuller set, which was stapled together in a "book." This first set is on two sheets of lined paper, written in red permanent marker (the kind that soaks through--I could write on only one side), and VERY mangled, mutilated, and moldy...I can see spores drifting through the air as I shuffle it around. Ick. Nasty old toychest. Take note that these pages, too, seem to have been part of a bigger set as they're numbered "4" and "5," respectively, so the other early drafts of the poems are probably lost. I'm a bit iffy on some of the punctuation as the page is so tattered. This is probably one of the earliest samples of my writing you'll find here; based on an illustration in the book version, in which there's a crow/raven with eyes similar to my earliest "King Kuts" drawing style, I'll tentatively date these between 1986-88 (elementary school).

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A Tree

A Tree sits
alone
all by itself
Like a dog
without a bone
or an antique [Note--I have crossed out "antiuge" and "anticque."]
without a shelf.
'Till [sic] some-one [sic]
came out,
and walked to the Tree
and looked all about
And hummed like a bee
His axe was all sharp
And he swung it around
It made a sound like a harp
And the Tree fell to the ground.

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Cat
[Note--this title is written in tentatively, after the fact.]

Shiny eyes, sleek body
He knows nobody
He does not live in a valley
He, this cat, lives in the alley. [Note--"this cat" is penned in after the fact with an arrow pointing to the sentence.]

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Pegasus

Silver wings beat the air
And a pegasus, it's [sic] mane fair,
flies off, shimmering like the
flame on a flair [sic].

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[Untitled]

The water is like the sky
Crystal clear,
The purest, cleanest water.
Until
A creature dumped OIL
into the water.
The Heron was killed
And so was the grebe
When trash was poured into the
Pond.
The birds flew away
And the animals migrated
But the fish couldn't be saved.
Soon the pond looked HORRIBLE
Until a kind creature
Cleaned it with help
But not help from the ho[rrible?]
MEN
who did it. This man was the... [Note--the last part of the line is too mutilated to read. See the second draft of these poems for a different version.]