Persona Poem

This month I've been taking part in a 10/10, where I'm supposed to write 10 poems in 10 days. Prompts have been posted on my school's poetry slam page. I've been cheating and doing the prompts out of order and not on the days they've been posted, but whatever. Here's a prompt that I was particularly nervous about, but had a lot of fun with:

PROMPT #8: This prompt requires a little research! I think that New Year's time can be very wistful and full of bittersweetness. Or else it's just an arbitrary marker of time. You know, either or. There are OODLES Facebook statuses with summaries about the 2013 year. PICK ONE. It can be a stranger, it can be yourself, it can be mine, whatever. Pick someone's (probably too long and indulgent) 2013 New Year's status and write a persona poem from one of the events. Try to make it funny and wild and exciting! (Don't worry about whether or not you're actually funny, just try to be). Test out funny voices to read it in. Make up words like Dr. Seuss. Add dramatic pauses. Fling rainbow dust across the span of the universe. Make this event seem like the coolest, most entertaining event that ever happened.

For some reason, I'm friends with like 5 million people who got engaged this year, so my newsfeed had all sorts of "2013 WAS THE YEAR I GOT ENGAGED" statuses. That served as the starting point for this persona poem, which is completely fictitious and not actually about anyone I know or anything I've experienced.

We met each other in our freshman year music theory class.

I was a beautiful angel of dominant seven chords,

He was a pretentious douchebag.

The first time we talked was at a party.

You know, one of the ones your first week of college,

Where nobody has ever had alcohol before,

So everyone is puking in everyone else’s faces?

Mmm yeah. Romance.

Love smells like partially digested pizza from Little Caesar’s.

Everyone is a little different when drunk,

But at the time I thought that everyone was the same kind of drunk: freaking annoying.

I went to the party to pick up my roommate who was passed out on a thrift store love seat.

As I woke her up and let her lean on my shoulder, ready for the long trek back to our dorm room, she vomited all over my sweatshirt. The sweatshirt I didn’t even like. The sweatshirt I wore specifically because I knew she would vomit on it.

What a sweet girl.

Like I said, nothing smells like love like vomit does, which I guess is why he came over to help me take her back to our room.

Everyone is a little different when drunk.

He was the type that rambled about Wagner, Foucault, and Freud.

All the way back to my dorm room where we dropped my roommate off.

All the way to the lounge where I had been doing my homework.

All the way to 2:00 when he finally fell asleep and I could finish my music theory homework in peace.

He was the most pathetic 18 year old drunk philosopher I had ever met, and that made me love him.

I realized that I had been spending too much time searching for a love that smelled like roses and chocolate.

A love too sweet to be of any substance.

And here I had love in the form of an inebriated 18 year old misquoting Europeans into a puddle of his own bile.

This love was gross. It smelled bad. It was too human.

But it stuck.

The first time we kissed was after figuring out how to spell Neapolitan 6^th chords.

He had mellowed to the point that he stopped trying to show off his smarts around me.

He wasn’t as pretentious as he once was. But he was 5 million times more awkward.

When we kissed our teeth knocked.

Our love smelled like the gross fake Chinese food we had just eaten in the cafeteria.

When he asked me to marry him it was cold, grey, pouring rain, and muddy.

The forecast had been for 75 degree sunny weather, my favorite.

He had intended to have a bunch of people come and sing some stupid pop song from the radio,

But everyone was sick with the swine flu or something.

It was just me and him and the rain and the homeless guy passed out on the park bench.

“You’d better have a good reason for making me come outside in this, idiot,” I shivered.

As he got down on one knee he slipped in the mud and the ring he had been saving up for for months flew out of his hands into a puddle.

Embarrassed, my vomit- smelling, teeth-knocking, Foucault-quoting idiot sat in the mud, covered head to toe, sitting cross-legged. He smiled nervously.

I went and picked the ring out of the polluted water and sat down next to him.

“Yes.”