VERSE AND REVERSE
by perletwo
Buffy snatched the medium-sized manila envelope out of the pile of mail and sneaked it upstairs to her room before anyone else noticed it. She felt silly doing it, but knew she'd feel sillier if she had to explain it to Willow or, God forbid, Dawn.
Slitting it open, she pulled out a check for $40 - not exactly the answer to her budgetary prayers, but a nice little bit of walking-around money - and examined it with a glow of satisfaction. Then she pulled out her contributor's copy of "Poet's Corner" and flipped to her entry.
This had started back before her death. Joyce's death had sent her into a dizzying whirl of housecleaning, trying to keep the grief at bay. Buffy had rooted through boxes of old stuff, scrapbooks, files, junk drawers - stuff so long forgotten she couldn't even remember why they'd kept it in the first place. That was how she found her old poems.
She'd started writing them more than a decade ago, taken with the practice after a long-ago junior high school English class assignment to keep and hand in a poetry journal. She'd blithely kept adding to it after that semester, right up until she was Called. Then her life started moving way too fast to worry about meter and rhyme.
That first journal was the first one Buffy found, and she'd cringed when she read through them again. 'Sophomoric' didn't even begin to cover how sappy and vapid they were. She'd had a pretty good feel for form and rhythm, but looking at them now she realized they weren't *about* anything. She'd had nothing to say, so she'd said it in style. A perfect metaphor for her personality back then.
{{I can do better than that,}} she'd thought, reading the poetry journal all the way through. Numbed through with grief over Joyce and fear for Dawn, stuck maintaining the brave stoic facade she'd built, she'd taken pen to paper and given it a shot. She'd suspected even then they weren't quite right, but she felt better for writing them. At the time that was all that seemed important.
Her first new efforts were shamingly bad, she'd realized, looking at them again after Willow resurrected her. Numbness had its advantages; she could look at the poems' technical detail without being touched by the emotions. So she started visiting the Sunnydale Library once a week, usually in the morning after Dawn headed out to school, and read through some of their books on poetry.
Some of what she read made perfect sense. Other books just made her head hurt. But she got enough of a sense of technique to polish up the poems she'd written before she died, and to spark ideas for a few new ones.
The library was also where she discovered "Poet's Corner," and finding the little magazine had done more to inspire her than anything on the library's rather stuffy and out-of-date Literature shelf. Seeing such a dizzying array of styles and ideas, so many real-live-people having so much *fun* playing with words, was just incredibly freeing. She stopped worrying about whether she was doing it 'right' and just got writing, then went back and polished later.
The new ones were the first ones Buffy had enough confidence in to send in to the magazine. The first three were rejected, but they came back with an encouraging note from the editors. These weren't quite right for them, they said, the technique was good and the style was catching, but there was a coldness to them, an emotional void, that didn't suit. Keep writing, they said, and keep sending them in, we want to see more of what you can do. That was enough to keep her from being crushed by the rejection.
This was the first one they'd accepted, and she felt a warmth radiate up from the pit of her stomach through her chest, ending up in a genuine smile as she read through her own words in black and white. Reaching far, far back in her memory, she finally identified the warm fuzzy feeling as happiness.
Once the glow finally faded away, she settled back on the bed, propping up on her pillows, to read through the rest of the magazine. That was fun. The little poetry journal came with an expensive cover price for a publication not much bigger than a TV Guide, and she hadn't yet allowed herself the luxury of buying one to bring home and study at her leisure.
It stopped being fun when she came to one particular poem whose images were hauntingly familiar. {{Nah. Can't be,}} she thought, reading through it again. {{Can it?}}
"This piece represents a stylistic departure for a frequent contributor to this digest. While still conveying the anarchic passion we've come to expect from this author, Campbell has chosen here to root his verse in abstract expression rather than the more visceral imagery he usually favors," ran the editor's notes.
GRAVITY
by William Campbell
Love led me up a long tower
A shining path to Glory
There to protect, to preserve,
Defend the love that therein led me.
My love was strong, and I to it deferred
Stood at its back, stalwart, brave and true
Sure in myself, that Love would win the fray
Right would prevail, and Dawn another day.
But I stood atop a tower built on sand
And my love beset by villains on all sides
Between Love and Hell I set myself
But the wind blew wrong, and down I fell.
I fell, I failed, I lost the fight for Love
For Glory and for incandescent Dawn
The battle met, the enemy vanquished
But such a cost - to love, to life, to right!
Landlocked I watched a shooting star
Fire free, then extinguish in the night.
In grief I wanted to touch the sun,
In rage I wanted to burn the skies,
In death I wanted to fall to ash,
To end the night, befell my cries.
But Dawn came upon me shyly
Glimmering through her tears
And I, earthbound, deferred again
Kept a promise of posterity
Suspended between my love
And the weight of gravity.
{{How *dare* he...}}
Buffy reached for the comfort of old resentments, the better to keep the protective shell of numbness around her heart, and pretended her face wasn't wet with tears.
In the quiet of the crypt, Spike was flipping through his own copy of "Poet's Corner."
He'd come a long way from the Bloody Awful Poet of the Victorian salon, he thought wryly, studying the effect his handiwork had in print. At first he'd shed his love of poetry along with everything else that reminded him of mortal life, lost in the thrill of new sensations after Dru turned him.
By the time that settled down a few decades later, he'd found poetry stale and devoid of new ideas. Plenty of style to be had, and occasionally some intellectual substance, but none of the passion that had come to govern his inner life as a vampire. He took some pleasure in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, but for any number of obvious reasons, he wasn't about to join in.
It wasn't until the last thirty or forty years he'd really returned to poetry in any serious way. He started with the Beats and their lyrical descendants, who helped liberate the form from stagnancy. Once that crossed with his discovery of the American Punk scene and its love of art, anarchy and subversion, he started scribbling at odd moments and hadn't stopped since.
And he had so much more of substance to say than William's pallid scrawls had, he'd thought. He'd enjoyed seeing his unlife's blood-soaked adventures taken for imaginings in "Poet's Corner," and after the chip the poems had been a way of stoking and releasing the fires of violence and bloodlust inside him.
Little did he know, then. The events he wrote about in "Gravity" cut so deep to his core they deserved a more serious approach. He'd almost not sent it in to the magazine, it was so different and so personal.
But he figured at the last, What the hell. What were the odds anyone who'd understand it would ever see it? Who reads poetry these days anyway?
Once the novelty of re-reading his own work wore off, Spike started from the front cover and moved on through the whole magazine, skimming through what he considered the obvious dreck, occasionally stopping to read one with a closer eye. Then he got to the "New Voices" section, and one entry there made him sit up straight in his favorite reading chair.
"Ms. Summers' work first reached our attention last year, and we at "Poet's Corner" have been watching her growth as an artist with pleasure. This is her first published work, but we feel sure it will not be her last to appear in these pages." Spike growled in disbelief. {{No bloody way...}}
IN MOTION AND AT REST
by Elizabeth Anne Summers
An irresistible force
Natural enemy to
An immovable object
Dancing's all they've ever done
One dances for its life
One dances for its death
Which dance is which
All depends upon the tune.
Centrifugal motion sings of
Swings and roundabouts, of
Speed and heat and friction
And the music's burning truth
The dance spins out of control
Flying blind, the backbeat lost
The other partner catches her
Gripping hands sure and solid
The closing of a circuit
The tumbling of a lock
A wave unable to resist
Breaking upon a rock
Irresistible force and immovable object
Bound by circumstance
Never to meet
If all they ever do
Is dance.
An image sprang into the vampire's mind, of his stopping Buffy's wild, demon-induced dance. Catching her shoulders in his hands and holding his ground.
{{The closing of a circuit,}} he thought. {{The tumbling of a lock.}} She'd known, damn her lying hypocritical eyes, she'd known then how right they were together. And she'd still hit him with her "just a kiss" line. {{How *dare* she...her an' her need for the last word...}}
Despite his best efforts to work up a good mad, he found his fingertips tracing her name on the page over and over, a smile playing around his lips.
It wasn't until the small hours of the next morning that the same thought occurred to both soi-disant poets.
{{If *I* saw his/her poem in here...}}
Buffy sat up in bed and kept the reading lamp burning until daylight at the thought, while Spike sucked down an entire bottle of wine in hopes of blocking it out.
{{...then he/she's almost certainly seen mine!}}
Tomorrow was going to be a *very* long day for them both.