When you’re a fourteen year old boy, the fairer sex can seem powerful and mysterious… as evidenced by my teen-aged self’s ode to the “Girls of Earth.” This is poem number three in the Purple Parchment series — poem two seem lost to us, hopefully not forever.

This Episode’s Poem

“Girls of Earth”

Bodies move like liquid amber
Move in time with the world
Move in harmony with biology

Faces like a thousand stars
Breaking through the fog in young minds
Illuminating minds with a song of life

Eyes like shining pools of rainbows
Drilling deep into young mens’ souls
Capturing hearts without effort

Hair like silken dew
Laying in silence
Tying pubescent hands

Lips like lasers of flesh
A touch and a boy’s mind is theirs’
Lost in a well of dreams

Girls of Earth
Men are helpless
Slaves to your minds

07-17-1981
#3

Teen Poetry Episode Two: Girls of Earth by Matthew Wayne Selznick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Welcome to the first episode of Teen Poetry, the video podcast featuring poems written as a teenager and read as an adult! Unless otherwise noted, all teen poetry in this show will be from the hundreds I wrote in the early 1980’s as a fourteen year old boy.

This Episode’s Poem

“Empathy Friendship”

The phone rang, the Doors stopped
I left my work to answer
Even as my mother called me out.

From my friend’s voice I knew
Something was wrong. He told me
His girlfriend was leaving
He projected his inner pain, I consoled him.

He hung up. I returned to my work.
From the air around me I felt my mind bend.
Feelings of frustration and helplessness
In my mind’s eye I experienced my brother’s pain.

How simple humans are
Our hopes waxing and waning even as Luna’s.
Temporary love is our perpetual curse.

How complex humans are
Feelings hidden ‘neath a brick mask
Yet stripped clean by those close.
Without friendship the valve would remain
Closed.
Eternally

07-16-1981
#1

Teen Poetry Episode One: Empathy Friendship by Matthew Wayne Selznick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.