WARD KELLEY -
Poets, by their very nature, are outsiders; indeed this might be exactly how they were intended by Nature. The sensitivity required for poetry generally springs from a childhood in which the poet discovers the rest of the children are solidly grouped into assemblies whose rules appear arcane to the young poet. The resulting pain is what – one can argue fuels the creative process.
Some poets harm their very selves in efforts to assume some form of normalcy, Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath leap to mind. Other poets achieve the acme of outsider status in their own unique manners, such as Eliot deciding he was really an Englishman, not a Missourian, or Dickinson's contention she was a wayward nun. But whatever the contrivance, we all have to solve the problem of the outsider's relationship to regular society - no easy task. And perhaps it is this friction, this grating of the outsider mind against the rock of societal mores, that sparks the poem itself.
A relative newcomer, APRYL FOX. I say 'relative' in that she has written 1000+ poems, but only in the past year or so has been publishing her work. In her piece, I see the struggle of the outsider and the sparks that alight.
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Apryl Fox has been writing since she was twelve-years-old, and her favorite authors include Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Asimov, and Sylvia Plath. She has been previously published in Word Riot, Locust, Offcourse, Erete's Bloom, and Seeker Magazine. Apryl lives in Michigan where she is currently working on three novels.
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APRYL FOXAwakeningIn the dark, I feel your arms slide around me and I tense, uncomforted by the feel of your skin against mine as we look at the burning house. Your skin reminds me too much of sandpaper, but I do not want to upset the intense concentration on your face as you ask the officer closest to you what went wrong, your questions bouncing around my ears like tamborines. You want to settle this matter of who started the fire, and was it anyone's fault, and was there a stove or lamp on when the house burst into flames. I would like to tell you that nothing is anyone's fault, that these things happen for the good of God, and maybe each terrible thing we go through is supposed to make us learn a little more about patience and tolerance, but I keep my mouth closed and I let you ask your questions in your own way. I am falling asleep on my toes as I stand there being nipped by the cold, my arms wrapped around myself as I shiver in my poncho--it had rained earlier, and the smoke rising from the house was like steam rising from a heated bath--my lips turning blue in the face. I have had so many sleepless nights for the past two years that I cannot even recall when it is time to wake or time to dream, and I stare around me in awe like Rip Van Winkle waking after forty long years of sleep.
copyright 2003 APRYL FOX
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