PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

College Essay

Matt Gallant



As I sat in the dull amphitheater of my bland old high school, it was us and them. I stared still as death at the blank page in front of me, and I knew for that holy moment, that blank page was like a void, the emptiness that separates me from the outside world. It was a thick white line that I would fill, blur like finger paint. The intensity of freedom flowed through my freeway system of veins and arteries. I felt it surge through me like a blood of a deeper red, darker, more florescent. I folded the corner of the page as I looked around the room. I saw the bully who had always treated me terribly. In the past, I had used poetry as a tool, to become the five-fingered hand, gripping the fist of control. My pen was my sword, slaying my own fire-breathing problems, in a sense. It was a way for me to drain away the overflowing anxiety. Now, I noticed a simple dynamic of my art and poetry. It was the link I held between my mental thoughts, and my physical senses. To create was to blur the fine line between them.



In the amphitheater, I was working on an English assignment, to compose a poem, but it didn’t feel like I had to, it felt more like I needed to, almost wanted to. In English class, there was a very obvious example of that same feeling of separation. I had a passion for reading and writing on my own, while they all had a passion for not reading or writing. I could sniff the trail out, placing my breadcrumbs down the road, in a way, for I knew then I wanted to write and draw for a living.



It was a hazy morning in the building, soon souring to a hazy afternoon. I glanced over to the bully again with a dark eye. He winked mockingly at me, and I flicked him off. I chewed absent-mindedly on my pen, thinking of what to write. I would bring my most abstract feelings into the most concrete forms, more real than it was before. Feverishly, I wrote out the poem hatched from my skull. It seemed to just come to me, flow and blend my own self, and my interaction with everything else. It was like the connection of two jigsaw puzzle pieces, putting two and two together, making us and them, Me. Memories flashed in my head, of that episode when the bully jumped me, and I stopped writing suddenly. When I wrote in the past, I wrote about troubles. At that instant though, I realized that to write about him was to let him in, to let him take control of my own self. To be tormented is to give him victory. I realized then, to beat him, I must write about something else entirely, in the midst of those troublesome memories.



Rather than venting my torment, I thought about the entirety of the moment, the keen blade of existence, and I started writing again. The plane took off, and landed neatly, so-to-speak. It was as if before, I would burn my hands by the heat of the moment, but now I thawed my hands by it. No longer was I a depressed ant, a slave to my own troubles. For the first time in my life, I felt I was able to consider myself a poet, rather than a boy who writes poetry. I wrote about my relationship with my girlfriend. I used the metaphor of an ant hill growing into a giant mountain to express how we had evolved over time. It was fresh on my lips, the taste of finally writing something worth writing, worth reading again and again.



The bell rang and the spell was broken. I didn’t feel like putting the poem away, because my English class any ways. I climbed the steep staircase, blending into the boring crowd, but now, I felt like a newborn baby, vulnerable, sensitive to the air. I turned the corner, bumped shoulders with the bully roughly. I did not seen to care much, or take notice. I turned the corner to room 225, and greeted my English teacher.



I sat down in the back row, a simple routine repeated, and watched as everyone else lazily walked in and did the same. I read my poem to myself, savoring each line, slowly adding in a last two cents here and there, to polish up each syllable. Class started, and as people read their poems, I started to doodle absently on the page. My hand seemed to just mold and I could see how it coincided with the poem, a manifestation of beauty that was painted upon the mind, was now painted upon the eyes. It was an annunciation of my piece, of my thoughts and feelings. The teacher broke my attention from my work and told me to pay attention in an irritated voice. I obeyed, and thought to myself how very fluent art and poetry were able to flow together, to form one stronger image than they were alone. Both art and poetry form an image within ones mind, and evoke emotion, but art and poetry together, is an even greater force.



The teacher called my name and said sarcastically, “Since you seem so eager to do well in this class, let’s hear your poem, Matt.”



I read it, letting my familiar words drench the many eardrums of the class, and slowly halted at the end. I felt like the peacock I had drawn on my page just then. It was like I had opened my luscious shrubbery of feathers for the world, and blooming like a mid-spring garden. The students and the teacher sat there, stunned. I knew in my mind they could not decipher my metaphor.



Then he said, “You and your girlfriend, Matt…You seem ver happy…. If can feel how much you love her…” Then to the class, “ What was the metaphor in Matt’s poem?” Every hand went up, each face certain they knew the answer, and they all did.



The discussion of my poem soon ended. The class seemed to sit there in a fog of confusion, unsure what to think of me. The reason they did not understand the situation is because for the first time, they were able to understand me. I knew then, that poetry is not only the transformation of the abstract to the concrete, the annunciation of emotion, but the deepest way of communication, my sincere connection to the outside world. They deciphered my metaphor, and I knew then the capacity of what I did, and I knew that it was what I was born to do.