Imitation

Would you catch me if I fall?
I hear you hesitate, I hear you stall
like one tripping on a crack;
stammering foot, stuttering answer
would you cure the cancer
eating angrily at my well-formed thoughts and creeds
like the insect intent on destroying weeds?
Answers though, don't come sailing
but instead with fractious failing,
They topple with the vicious waves.
I know you might
if I would fight.



Pretty sure that no one would recognize this as modeled after T.S. Eliot.  But I had to attempt.  Not because I love him so much (quite the opposite) but because this was too coincidental.  I'm currently a student of English Literature.  I'd been sailing along quite nicely - until "The Waste Land".  I read it and didn't understand a word.  Furthermore, I thought, "This is insane.  He was insane!  And yet, he's supposed to be some poetical genius.  And surely I'm supposed to 'get' him.  I have to 'get' him.  If I don't, I've made a mistake in my field of study."  Frustrated, I grabbed my six year old daughter and said, "We're going to write a poem.  Go grab some random books - we're referencing them."  So we wrote a nonsense poem including nursery rhyme references as well as references from Hemingway, amongst others.  The next day, my teacher admitted that she found this poem to be 'exclusive'.  That the references were so many it would be hard for most to follow.  The above poem, I modeled after the first stanza in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" which I enjoyed so much more than "The Waste Land."  


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