I’m Harper Joplin, and I’m from Jersey.
I find that the majority of northern New Jersey natives are insufferable dreamers, probably because we have the world’s best view of the New York City skyline. All those winking lights across the river tend to call out to a person’s inner idylls, making us wish for things like Camelot and stardom and a beautiful reality similar to that of “Newsies”.
So now I’ve got all this insightful pain and sentimental quips, all because I’ve spent my whole life looking out at the City, wishing to be as big and as bright and as perfectly shattered as the lights across the river.
I’d love to be that hopeless poet, romanticizing the world into a capsulized moment of aesthetic catharsis. Unfortunately, I’m still just a twenty-something year old college chick suffocating my inspiration in the social pits and hovels of young adulthood. All I can post up here is what makes it through, and what pulls me through with it. But hey, even Joyce couldn’t start with “Ulysses,” ya know?
So maybe someday I’ll be a famous writer. Maybe I’ll figure out what I’ve gotta do to build my own “Ulysses”. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll live up to all those dreams I had on warm summer nights, driving around my small Jersey town with my friends, looking at that damned skyline.
But until then, please read my shit and tell me what you think. I’d really love to know. =P
Babe Ruth is homeless in New York.
I tuned out the little girl’s wails, / as she begged for forgotten fairy tales. / The world is harsh, by now she’s learned, / though as I watched, my stomach churned. / On the bed, cold an…
There weren’t enough stars in this sky to light our way, / and after you would walk me home, all we had / were the few specks of starlight / we could see from my mother’s kitchen window,
You were the ones I swore to love forever, long before I knew what that would mean…Please remember that you never let me down.
Poets always tell us that Love is strong, that Hope is timeless, but I’m staring at a gravestone that proves them all wrong.
If every soldier had a flower…