wanderlust (i guess)

(Wow I'm so sorry)

I spend my time thinking of places

scattered across the earth

and how I'm not going

anywhere; simply staring at the maps

and pictures -

looking.

Wasting my life looking

at all of the places

and the awe inspiring pictures

of the parts of the earth

that I only know through maps -

instead of actually going.

That's the hard part: going.

Only looking

at the lined maps

and thinking of places

that the earth

has to offer, and the pictures -

the world rendered in a few flat colors - pictures

of locales I want to be going

to, learning about the people of the earth,

and really looking

at these places

rather than the cruel simplicity of maps.

Because these maps

can show me where to go and these pictures

are worth a thousand words, but places

must be worth a million, because going

and looking

really tells you more about the earth.

I want to paint the earth

in vivid stories that maps

cannot show; go looking

for the pictures

myself - always going

to new places.

Because the earth is told in words and pictures

that I cannot see in maps; for it is going

out and really looking to know these places.

...

Mostly I have to say that my annoyances with fixing my poem and just generally with writing it was the dang style itself. Sestinas, by nature, have a certain way of being written which lends itself to being repetitive and I had to fight myself to make sure that I didn't say the same thing in every single stanza. The repetition of the specific words made it so that I was boxed into certain things to say and that I also had to deal with making sure that the repetition got my point across without beating a dead horse. Particularly, I had trouble moving the theme forward, rather than staying in one place and saying the same thing over and over again. I enjoy poetry, but I'm not a fan of imposing arbitrary rules onto how it should be written. While it can come out really well when written, it certainly isn't the best thing to have a bunch random people who haven't written a poem in forever, if at all, to have to write. That said, I think mine is alright, though I had great difficulty writing it in the first place.