Poetic 3--Eric Whetstone

This walk poem stumbled into my hands yesterday almost by chance. My best friend and mentor from last year who I hadn’t seen since had decided to surprise me by showing up at my apartment Sunday night. He had to leave Wednesday morning to get back to New York City and my classes happened to get cancelled for the day, so I threw out my plans to go walking later and decided to write about our journey (my roommate, who he also mentored, decided to tag along). Once he got on the Chinatown bus my roommate and I headed to the Aquarium in Camden, only adding to the walk and what was available to write about. It should be noted that none of us had slept the night before, and that’s what I’ll blame me forgetting my notebook on, so I had to write after I got back. The poem is a recounting of the events as I best remembered them and simply hints at what was going on (as how my imagination thought of them), rather than outright stating it. For example: Small rural hometown + one vivid imagination = beasts. Where beasts are subways/buses. Since I didn’t get to write as I walked I missed out on some of the pacing and timing that I had initially wanted to incorporate in my poem. It was also used as a form of reference to the great times we shared this past week and the emotions involved between the three of us (I was not the one blowing kisses). The cigarette lines were put in to show when a new walk was started again upon exiting public transportation, but also to show some of the timing (more cigarettes than that were smoked). The fact that the poem is really more like a recounting of some epic adventure rather than a simple walk can probably be blamed on my love of fantasy and shows how infested it is within my brain.