Much More Like Your Modern-Day Peter Pan

I'm not sure I have much future as a poet, but I dabbled with poems long before I started writing on a daily basis. It's just a stupid little habbit I picked up somewhere: I think of clever, multi-dimensional lines or ideas, and build a few more around them, all in my head (the good ones are never very long, because I can only fit about six lines in my head at one time). I play around with the order and wording for a while, then when I'm satisfied with what I have, I get sentimental and write them down on the nearest available outlet, in fear of losing them forever.

The reason I'm explaining them is that, after a small squabble with my family at suppertime, I holed myself up in my room and filed through some old shit I had lying around, and happened to find a few snippets of poetry hidden within the pile. They're nothing spectacular, but I thought I'd share some favourites.


Scribbled inside the back cover of Jesus' Son, amongst phone numbers, notes to self and information on my flight home from Denver, and the second half (they make sense together, to me anyway), written on the back of a boarding pass and shoved inside the same book:

"I keep pictures under my pillow of the girl I used to be
Like he keeps his real name tattooed around his wrist..."

"...After all, isn’t part of walking watching where you put your feet?
Without a little recollection, how could we ever exist?

My mother always said it takes more to live than a heartbeat."

Small sheet of notepad paper, crumbled up in my guitar equipment box:

“He’s not much in the way of a gentle-man
Much more like your modern-day Peter Pan”

Inside my song-writing book (which I suppose qualifies it as a song, only I never wrote any music for it, lazy me:

“We cower below a man ten feet tall
The magistrate takes a bow
Good god damn, how the mighty fall
We’re all tied up like puppets now

When he raises a string
The rebels all sing his praises
A flick of the wrist
And we all twist and turn below
He’s got us on our toes
When he wrinkles his nose
We fall down when he lets us go”

On two equally boring white slips of paper, inside a dictionary:

“Deep down where our hearts reside
Is there no feeling that you can’t tame?”

“Romance is cyanide to the naive
And oxygen to the cruel”

-Manda