100 Poems on Identity 1-5

Acrostics and regular sonnets exploring the truth of our identities

 

 

No. 1

 

In the beginning I came from that place

Little more than anywhere you might go

In a part of reality common to our race

Virtually unknowable; not thought to be so,

Evidently beyond our own kind

Definitely devoid of all we can sense

Living in a place one cannot know or find

On earth or anywhere else in the present tense;

Visible here but only rarely there,

Existing in this form before we came;

In our ending going back somewhere

Not known by humans ever to be the same;

In many ways the same, but in others not;

The difference being the very ways they never thought.

 

 

No. 2

 

I am not what I was; I am what I have become,

I am not what I see, or what has been done to me

I am not the one you see from where you’re from

And before I spoke you could not really be,

You never thought these things I’m sharing with you

You never believed them if you did you see

You would have died believing your world was true

Only a record of a so called theory

Written on the memories of others dying too;

But where were you after you knew your mom?

Before even your father knew?

Before you even heard of Viet Nam?

After you imagined yourself in death

Becoming a dead man’s spirit beyond our last breath?

 

 

No. 3

 

At first I only knew the comfort of the womb

Having forgotten where I was from

Until finally running out of room

There in a world in which I had come to become.

Where I had never been before now

I looked around, recognized nothing here,

For in mostly discomfort I howled somehow

Ever wanting to go back home it was clear

Or wishing someone had actually lied,

Really, just letting me see what this world was

With all the vainglories that herein reside

Here, was a place I didn’t want for what it does;

And wanting to crawl back up inside and keep

That place you live outside so I could safely sleep.

 

 

No. 4

 

First I learned the language I was taught to repeat

Instead of the words I wanted, I only spoke theirs;

Remarkable when you consider I had to compete.

Swearing words I repeated unawares

Though taught to me from a very early age

Were swear words they said I should not speak

Others thought it wise to push me to a rage

Requiring I abandon my words as freak,

Dealing with me as a rebel child to change,

Demanding I forsake the culture I knew

And then allowing them to make me seem strange;

More educated than free, but without that clue

All I could do was stay within their bounds;

I, written on a blank page; more than it sounds …

 

 

No. 5

 

I am not the one you see as me, you must know,

But a sign I wear pointing to the real me,

So you’re not the one I see also

You are like a cat under a blanket, you see?

You see the sheet as it is moved and laugh

But your mind knows it is not a moving sheet

But the sheet part is only the outer half;

That is the same way you work your deceit;

I arrange the letters on the pages you read

They aren’t me just what I think I am

To find my thinker is only to get a bead

And point your mind like a rifle at a clam . . .

I am not the clam or the grain of sand within it

My pearl … the time in a moment seen as me in it.