Look for the Boy

A revolutionary man,

Who wears no black cape

Throws no bomb

Burns no building and

Kills no dignitary,

Is hard to find 

In a cast of thousands.

But look for the boy

Who has a fire in his eyes

That says he's been 

Alone too long,

And watch his world self-destruct.

If you had asked me just yesterday give you a short list of things I'd never put on this blog, poetry from my freshman year of college would not have made the list.  That's because the idea would have been so unthinkable, it wouldn't have occurred to me as being even a remote possibility.

But here we are.

Today my sister Sandy gave me a copy of a publication she had found among some items she's sorting through from the attic of the house where my family lived during my high school and early college years.  "I think you have a poem in this," she said.

The long, thin, illustrated booklet, a bit yellowed with age but otherwise in good shape, was the free poetry writers workshop anthology (all lowercase in the original) from the Experimental College at CSULB.  I don't see the Experimental College anywhere on the university's Website these days, so there are probably a diminishing number of us who remember its freewheeling opportunities for non-credit study of topics outside (sometimes way outside) the usual curricula.

I confess that I have corrected a couple of typos in the copy above.  But otherwise, it is as I wrote it.  I brought it home, where photographs from Norway stared back at me from a newspaper on the dining room table.

I couldn't (now, and perhaps not then) name the events that led me to write this poem.  I was eighteen. Now, almost four decades after it was published, I've seen far too much of the handiwork of those lonely boys in the time that has passed since I wrote it.