If I Can Make It there, I Can Make It Anywhere

All the unknowns I lusted for and drank greedily like the toddler slurps the last drops of his juice box. “Share with me your deepest secrets,” I cried.

I look to her inhabitants. They lose themselves and fall into her grasp and she takes them up like a thirsty sponge grabs fleks of water. Her awesome immensity seduces them. Potentiality and opportunity she offers and they lunge – just as they did before.

They push, they shove – grasping for the prize that would send them to oblivion. Ambition and joy, despair and sorrow shine and bleed and she has no pity or sympathy only reward.

I am on the boat and she throws waves and waves and with each onslaught the others are pitched into her darkness. She swells and convulses and I slip and fall – following.

Baudelaire has this amazing descriptive quality which I focused on imitating in this poem that I wrote about the opportunity in NYC. The poem that I took the most ideas from was “A Hemisphere In Tresses” which also seems to be talking about a city. He personifies the city and I did the same with NY. His work has many analogies and I tried to emulate this in my work.

Baudelaire also goes from first person narrative to general ideas. For instance, in the first two stanzas of “Any Where Out of the World,” the first makes statement and the second he launches into the first person. I started with first person and ended with it.

This was a very fun activity.