This morning I read the introduction to the book poetry 180 by Billy Collins where he describes that his goal for the collection was to

assemble a generous selection of short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically “get” on first hearing poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate.

I read a few poems from the collection, which I have read through before, and was inspired to write the poem you have here, “what I am not”.

The idea to write about this topic, my desire as a young man to become what I thought people wanted me to become, was already flying around my head.

I have specific memories of the “big” lines. When I was a freshman in high school I read and carried around a very very thick biography of Albert Einstein. I knew that everyone thought that Einstein was the smartest man ever, so I carried that very thick book around demonstrating that I must be also smart.

It was foolish, and I remember that I really didn’t understand a lot of the book, if only because I was not that interested. Still, I went to my guidance counselor that year and proclaimed that I wanted to become a physicist when I grew up.

And so I did. I have a masters degree in physics from Ball State University.

The big pants memory is from my senior year of college when I took a sewing class, ostensibly because it would make me look complex, like a renaissance man who was not only worldly (I was getting a double major in physics and English at the time) but had practical skills. In that class I made an absurdly large pair of pants.

I lost those pants before I could wear them much. Even in the 1980’s they were ridiculous.

The big ideas memory that sticks out was my valedictorian speech at my high school graduation. There were four of us that year that had a perfect 4.0 gpa out of the 110 who graduated. Our class was exceptional, I now believe, full of intelligent and interesting people who I now wish I had spent more time getting to know versus trying to impress with my big brain.

All four of us gave speeches, each one based on one of our years of high school. I had our senior year and my speech was so full of dictionary words that I don’t even remember what I said.

I do remember my friend David who was class president making an incredibly moving speech that brought tears to the entire audience. It is the type of speech I try to give now, given the rare chance to speak.

The big hands memory is a bit more obscure. I tried to be good at lots and lots of sports and was, at least a bit, good at many of them.

My senior year of college I asked my track coach if I could do every event at a meet–hurdles, pole vault, triple jump, shot put, hammer throw, 5k, 1500, steeplechase, etc.

For some reason he let me. It was a home meet and we were going to win anyway, so sure.

That memory is complicated because at some point I didn’t want to do these things so that others would think a certain way about me–I just wanted to do a lot of things.

I realized that it was ‘interessante” (I’m studying Italian in Duolingo right now).

Now, looking back as an adult, I am much more away of “doing things for others” so to speak, spending my time attempting to influence the way that others think of me.

I’ll never get away from it totally. I still care much too deeply how others think about me, or how I think they might think of me, wanting others to think, “hey, that’s an interesting person”.

So I am suspect of my motivations to do things even now at fifty-eight years of age.

Except, along the way I found that learning new things and doing interesting projects is something that I get a lot of joy from doing.

A lot.

So I read poetry, novels, nonfiction. I write poetry and music and books. I draw and paint. I build things, fix things, invent things, design things. I do puzzles and make hot honey and grow really hot peppers. I volunteer and take care of our three dogs and do my best to be an attentive and loving husband and father of four children.

Even telling you this feels like a flex, but that’s not what I intend.

This desire to be thought smart has made me at times a mean person, making clever jokes at the expense of others, teasing in a way that made me look clever but someone else not so much, developing a sense of humor that is more about making clever wordplayish observations that are not necessarily easy to get right away and can make others feel dumb.

I am working on those things even now as a member of the AARP crowd. I don’t want to be cruel or mean or attention-seeking.

I am trying more to be myself, whatever that is.

Sometimes I’m just annoying, I think. I like to make up catch-phrases and repeat them until others, who often get sick of them, also start saying them.

So this poem was written out of all that.

I do some clever things here, some wordplay as in breaking up “forgotten” into “forgot” on one line and “ten” to start the next line, each having both meanings in the poem aside from the full word which also works.

I tried to write poem that breaks the lines up the way I think would best be spoken out loud. I don’t always write that way, sometimes very intentionally not that way.

This poem does not have any allusions to other poems or even within itself, something I often do. There are not layers here and at most are little bits of clever wordplay, such as using the words “rewind” and “re-win” next to each other.

Let’s see what the WordPress AI has to say about this poem. I think there are going to be hands and books and pants.

This was the most obvious image, but this one was better:

The featured image here is a painting that my mom did of me when I was a kid. The original (below) is in color and honestly, this boy really was me, pulled into myself, insecure, head down, eyes covered in long hair to hide who I really was. Nice job, Mom.

Mom never signed any of her art, not that I remember. She was a lot like this painting as well.