My First Inklings of Poetry

The expression of a bruised heart

My First Inklings of Poetry

I remember glimmerings of poetry from my high school days. I had taken up figure skating quite late in my life, well early actually, but then quit because the club closed and then I started up again after puberty when the club was back on its feet. There was a skater who was competing with the junior men’s and would soon be a senior men’s competitor. He was cute and close enough to my genetic makeup and age that I sometimes thought, could that have been me if I had stuck with it. I didn’t really have fantasies about the guy but did hope that some kind of brotherly friendship or closeness would come out of the relationship.

I gained the strength and coordination to skate on the same ice at the same time as him but where I was working on single jumps he was working on doubles and triples. He frequently went off to a bigger city to train with the heavy hitters while I went off to the drudgery of school and then the escape of skating on early morning ice five days a week and three to four weekdays after school and on Saturday and Sunday. I was strong and at some points fearless launching myself into axles and double toe loops. But never as fearless as my seven year old self who would practice barrel jumping without the barrels.

I’m not sure if there was a crush or simply a kind of thing fans have when they desire something or someone. At that point I had no friends, and no male friends, just people in the high school band, the odd school party and a series of confused girls who thought we were an item. So no, no male friends at all, which now that I put it in print seems pretty strange. I may have skied with someone occasionally but usually it was a family member. I devoted my time to skating. There was guy I sometimes walked home from school with who has featured later in my life and in my writing, much later and took on a much different form, but the sentiment or at least idea for a novel seemed to be there.

Following an impulsive heart, I started to wrote the occasional poem on small pieces of paper and I think I left one for the skater in his skate bag at some point. It didn’t have the effect I had hoped and the whole thing was pretty embarrassing. I don’t think the poem was particularly bad and it was heartfelt I wasn’t trying to write like anyone else––no brimstone and heave ho or anything like that, just putting down what was in my heart. What the hell was in my heart? I didn’t really want to admit I was gay––it wasn’t a particularly sexual attraction though his physique was intriguing: thick muscled legs almost disproportionate to his torso. I think I had a much better proportioned body and probably would have been a helluva skater if I had kept with it from age seven. I was built more like Robin Cousins, well maybe my legs weren’t quite as long.

At one point my mother must have sensed my attraction though wouldn’t have encouraged any homo activity or yearnings, but she mentioned that we were likely very very distant cousins because of his last name and my ancestors’ name. Somehow hailing back to the highlands of Scotland.

What is this desire? When you want to be like someone? For a moment we did have a touchy feely but he was far more experienced than I and I was still more concerned with ‘love’ than sex, so the whole thing fell flat. I didn’t enjoy it, and he didn’t get what he wanted out of the interaction. From early on, his world had been about him, he was the centre of his universe and justifiably had to be. And he had his own desires; at one point he marched into the change room and announced to no one in particular that he and another competitor (very dashing) were friends again, the stand-off had ended. Was I supposed to be happy for him? If not heartbroken then a bit jealous. Another potential male relationship bit the dust hard and dry. My world had not been about me, or if it had, it had been about finding me somewhere in all of that confusion. I was in an environment where I was not good enough to compete. However I continued to fly into the air, surprise myself and have my coach (who was also his coach), say what a shame it was I hadn’t stuck with it, and started so late.

I soon started taking ballet to help the skating and eventually fell under ballet’s spell. The writing bug eventually became entrenched, if not actualized, for many other reasons but it was a long time before I wrote another poem.