i will not write about yesterday's sports day affair. all you have to know is that i missed it because i took blue slip.

anyway. last night proved to be one of the most stressful nights in all my years of being a lit student. all thanks to the poetry assignment teo asked us to do - Leopard Skin by Douglas Stewart. i swear i stared at the poem so long and so hard [since monday night] that i think i have memorized it. since the damn internet doesn't contain ANYTHING about this poem whatsoever [you can't even find the bloody thing through google] i will attempt to type it out from memory. yes, i looked at it THAT HARD.

Leopard Skin by Douglas Stewart

Seven pairs of leopard skin underpants
Flying on the rotary clothes-line! Oh, look, look, virgins
how with the shirts and pyjamas they whirl and dance
and think no more, in your own trembling emergence
like butterflies into the light, that tall soft boy
who nightly over the radio crooned and capered
alone in his room in weird adolescent joy
is mother's boy, softy: has he not slain a leopard?

But more than that: does he not wear its skin
Secretly, daily, superbly? Oh, girls, adore him
For dreaming on velvet feet to slay and to sin
He prowls the suburbs, the wild things flee before him
He miaous at the leopardesses, and they stop
He is a leopard: he bought himself in a shop.

oh my GOOD GOD. I MEMORIZED THE ENTIRE POEM. that is how much i thought about it ok, HOW MUCH. waste my memory space. oh my god oh my god what is wrong with me. oh my god am reeling in shock from what i have just typed out.

on the other hand, maybe this means i have a photographic memory if i try hard enough.

this poem is about sex - do not deny that you thought about sex the first minute you read it. and yes, my whole critical analysis was about SEX. i think i may be the only one who didn't try to give an answer more fitting of MOE's wholesome answer schemes. though i admit i racked my brains so hard to put my ideas across in a less offensive away - thus resulting in today's [worse than usual] brain drain.

but frankly, the first time i read it, other than the word 'sex' there were other reactions of mine to it, such as, 'what the heck?' and then i talked about it with some other people and they all talked about struggling with identity and essentially had very tame ideas.

needless to say i procrastinated till ten thirty at night and sat at my desk and willed myself not to tear my hair out. wrote about two paragraphs about identity crisis and awkwardness of adolescence before deciding i didn't really understand that point of view. stared blankly and sadly at the wall in front of me till parents came back and i asked my mom to read it. bad move. she gave some warped and obviously off-key analysis about how it was about A BABY BOY. this further confused me. then asked my dad to which he replied matter of factly that it was about sex and the permissiveness of Australian society towards sex. told dad i couldn't possibly write that and he asked why not - if my lit teacher truly understood the poem then it would be acceptable for me to tell it like it is and if she thought my views warped she was obviously a moron. you probably didn't get that but i'm hoping you didn't. anyway. to cut a long story short, dad basically told me not to sugar coat it and not give a mild answer - i needed to cut deep into the poem.

i mulled over that for the longest time because while i agreed - i didn't really dare to write about that in my essay. finally decided to go with my gut feeling - a good poet always intends a gut feeling. so wrote about sex and soon i can expect my lit teacher to send me for counselling for having a perverse mind.

anyway, why should sex be such a taboo. perhaps lit teacher is a lot more open-minded than i think. heck moe and it's constricting ideas about such things being immoral - they exist and so they exist and i will write about it truthfully and honestly. LITERATURE IS TRUTH. they should stop trying to glaze our eyes over with rosetinted glass. so in essence, this poetry homework brought up a whole lot of other issues for me - not just that is was so hard to tackle - but WHY it was so hard to tackle. because i was afraid to write about my views for fear of getting labelled 'sick in the mind'. if i don't overcome that fear - if none of us overcome that fear - we will never be able to write as ourselves, truly. there is nothing wrong with sex and people should not make us feel that there is. it is we who taint things for ourselves with our own foolish and twisted humanity.

+ posted by M @ 8:29 PM