Limited

Limited by, Carly Farkas

I Am living life peacefully like a dove flying in the clear blue sky

I Believe everything happens for a reason

I Close my closet doors every night because I’m still scared of the monsters

I Dance, but only when I’m forced to

I Eventually learned how to drive a boat when I was 10 years old

I Flew towards Israel until we had to turn around because the plane was broken

I Go to the city and give turkeys to the homeless on thanksgiving

I Have heard the trickling sound of water when the fossit isn’t fully shut off

I Imagine what the world would be like if everything was perfect

I Jump when I’m scared

I Knew I shouldn’t have pierced my own ears, but I did it anyways

I Littered a few times when there was no other place for the garbage

I Make mistakes, which makes me human

I Never choose the easy way out because I prefer to complicate the task

I Only cry when I have to

I Prefer to say my birthday is in winter, but it’s really the fall part of December

I Quickly bike along the streets like Lance Armstrong

I Ride my snowboard down the mountain in the winter

I Spend my summers at Camp Wayne

I Travel out to the Hamptons with my family as often as we can

I Used to unroll toilet paper rolls when I was little

I Vacuumed my pacifiers when I was too old to use them

I Wish I could take back my mistakes, but at the same time, they’ve formed who I am

I Xerox my hands and feet when I’m bored

I Yawn when I’m tired, tired enough that I can sleep for hours, wake up and yawn again

I Zoomed passed the other cars when I was driving on the highway

I Am living life peacefully like a dove flying in the clear blue sky and

I Believe everything happens for a reason

A Reflection on Limited

It my first full week of 11^th grade, and throughout the week all my teachers were teaching lessons and giving textbook homework, except English. I would head to English knowing that I was learning something new, in a fun way. Writing poems, to me, is something I enjoy.

Mr. Daszenski had said in class that we will be free writing in class to form ideas and a base for our poems, but I took that differently. I wrote about specific moments in my life that I enjoyed because I knew what I wanted to write from the start. My thought was to write random moments in my life that I enjoyed, or moments that stuck with me. I had completed this third draft with the writing style of scrambled memories all over, and when I read it to myself, it wasn’t as strong as it could be. The idea of having moments scrambled was something I liked, but I felt it needed some kind of organization. I tried to make it work by changing different parts of the poem, but in the end, I had thought to follow the alphabet. At first it seemed like a great idea, but then thinking more into it, it became worse and worse. As I wrote one line for ever letter of the alphabet, I noticed I was Limited in what I could write because it only gave me a certain amount of lines, and words to use. Then, once I completed the poem, and I read it aloud, I enjoyed the way it sounded and thought that the memories in my life that I put in were significant and all of them meant something to me. In fact, I had used most of the lines from my first and second drafts.

Once my poem was completed, I had called it, My Life Scrambled in an Orderly Fashion, which really explained the poem. Although Limited fit the title because it was limited in what I could write, it really was my life scrambled within a poem, but in an orderly fashion because of the alphabet.

Although I am not a strong writer, I believe this poem has a lot of meaning to it and it really describes who I am, and what I do. My favorite line is “I Close my closet doors every night because I’m still scared of the monsters.” This line is what describes my childhood, and as much as I don’t want to admit it, it can even describe me now. Although I don’t believe monsters are real, I still get scared when my closet door is open at night. When I was little I used to have a sign on my closet saying “No Monsters Allowed,” but I would think they were there anyways. We’re in the process of building a new house and my dad made sure that my closet doors are not facing my bed, because he knew, I would have to get up and close the door every night.

Poetry is something I enjoy to write, especially when it rhymes, because of the same reason I like this poem. When people write poetry, it is as if they are limited because they can only use certain words that rhyme, while free verse can cause you to write anything. Since we weren’t really supposed to use the rhyming technique, I decided to challenge myself by making this poem limited as well.