Arisa Helps Me With My Poem Happiness

I have never been happy (no pun intended) with a poem I wrote maybe five years ago called Happiness. Arisa helped me in our tutorial session by making the poem more immediate and taking out what I think of as connective tissue much of the ideas which came from pseudo-mirroring a poem that I used as a prompt for this poem, Welcome, Fear by David Rivard. After taking Arisa's ideas for the material I found the form wasn't working. I tried couplets which didn't quite do it and went to the form below. It makes me happy with what I feel is subtle brokenness, close to what I felt in the original form but evolved. Here are the before and after poems side by side.

Happiness After reading David Rivard’s Welcome, Fear I am quite grateful that you said  I can choose to be happy or sad and I should choose happy when I push the down elevator button in the morning, that elevator with the mirrors on 4 sides that puts on ten pounds and twenty years. To happily stride out into a shit-filled city armed with my own happy shit-eating grin. And that is my path to enlightenment, no need for hope or love or even striving for anything other than making a single choice. Easy to say, maybe easy to do but what am I supposed to do when I want someone to wake up beside me? It’s not hard, not impossibly difficult, a relief even, at least in this moment, to recall a blonde curl against your face on Sunday mornings, the sun just a suggestion beneath the window blinds, as you went from sleep to wake, your lids fluttered and then opened, the cornflower blue of your eyes just visible in the dusky bed beside me. And my hands began, my mouth against yours, the first true pebble dropped into an unbelievable deep pond. Now there is no sun, no window blind, no blonde curl. And its not like I thought it was going to go on forever.  But it’s more like you have gone off menu and chosen happy while I’m still staring at two pages full of really fucked up choices. A story we once told each other, now has the ending gone but the middle is missing too. I know it’s you not me. Or I think I’m supposed to know that. But you know it’s really like I’m standing up the driveway, the porch light off, trying to find the keyhole and failing again and again.  Would be nice if someone would just flick a switch. Nice even if someone could.

Happiness In that elevator with mirrors on four sides that puts on ten pounds and twenty years, I’m grateful you said I can choose to be happy or sad, I stride out into a shit-filled city armed with my own happy shit-eating grin. But                               what am I supposed to do when I want someone to wake up beside me?                  A blonde curl against your face on Sunday mornings, the sun beneath the window blinds, your lids fluttered then opened and there was the cornflower blue of your eyes.                     My mouth against yours, the first pebble dropped into an unbelievably placid pond.                   It’s not that I thought it would go on forever. You go off menu and choose happy while I stare at two pages of fucked-up choices. The middle of our story is gone.                      I’m standing up the driveway, the porch light off,  trying to find the keyhole and failing. I want someone to flip the switch on.