Day 110: Shakespeare's High School Poetry... Isn't it Ironic? Don't Ya Think?

I like quoting movies, TV shows, and songs, and one of my favorite songs to quote is Alanis Morissette's "Ironic."

When something ironic is mentioned, I'll often say something along the lines of, "Wow, isn't it ironic? It's like a 'No Smoking' sign on your cigarette break" or "it's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife."

I think it's because I just like the concept of irony. I like the fact that we have a term for this broad category of events that happen that are the reverse of what is expected. This can be anything from the Titanic - an unsinkable ship that sinks on its maiden voyage - or a line from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "water, water every where, Nor any drop to drink," which is about a sailor surrounded by salt water he cannot consume.

An Irony poem, then, is one that involves some kind of discrepancy.

I wrote one of these in college, which I immediately thought of for this week. I want to try and find it and type it out here because I remember really liking it, even though it was quite innocent. It was about looking around my spotless, organized, just-cleaned room and not being able to find what I'm looking for.

And, ironically in and of itself, as I did not know the subject of this week's poem until today, I actually wrote a type of irony poem recently. It was one of those poems that I wrote when I was in the moment to get it out of my head, which I know is where my best work comes from, even though the majority of the time it's not good stuff that I need to get out.

Nevertheless, here's the type of Irony poem I wrote on the train on the way home from work one day when I couldn't shake the toxic thoughts that were poisoning my emotions:


Toxic Thoughts

My entire body is asleep
Except for my mind.
My mind is awake.
My mind is working.
My mind is wild.
It's uncomfrotable enough
When just an arm is asleep.
Or a foot.
A leg.
But when my sanity is asleep,
I can feel the sparks
As the blood is forced away
By a poison.
A toxicity that reaches the end of each finger,
The depth of each toe
Stopping just short of the delicate skin of my neck
So my mind is tormented
With nothing but the sensations
Of a seizure of insanity.
It's consumed with the toxic thoughts
Of being eaten alive by invisible fire ants
That I cannot brush off
Or run from.
I cannot escape the toxicity.
I can only feel it burn.
My mind controls my body
And my mind is slowly losing control.