Acronym Poem

My sophomore year I took a creative writing class with one of my favorite teachers in my school. The full year of the creative writing class consisted of three terms: one for fiction writing, one for play writing, and one for poetry writing. I took the full year of creative writing, though a lot of people just take one term of it. One of the first things we did in his class was write an acronym poem. He gave us strict directions to follow. It had to spell out our first name (or our full name if we were ambitious) and it had to include a few things. If I remember right, he wanted us to include a kind of fruit in our poem, an ocean, and a color...something like that. When I showed my poem to the class, he told me I should submit it to my schools literary magazine (but I never did). He liked the poem quite a bit.

I haven't tried writing much poetry since I took that class. I write song lyrics all of the time, but I never just sit and write just plain old poetry. Although, I'm not going to post the acronym poem I wrote for his class. I'll post the latest one that I've been working on.

I think acronym poems are a lot of fun. I usually like poems that don't rhyme, but sometime free verse stuff is a little too crazy for me. Acronym poems still have some order but don't have to rhyme. They're a lot of fun and pretty easy for anyone who wants to experiment with writing poetry.

My name is a unique statement of who I am, a stamp of my originality. A declaration of my love for being the only person I can be, me.

You might hear it without a second thought. Pass by it without a second glance. Maybe you don't hold the same reverence for your name as I do mine. Maybe you wonder how letters can represent a person. Just letters out of something as organized as the alphabet. You try to form the letters, the vowel, the sound with your lips. You try to grasp it, but they are still just letters to you. Just the same familiar combination of letters that have represented you your whole life. The same combination of letters that you're father yelled when he was angry with you, or your mother called in search of you, to tell you to come inside when you playing outside as a child and it started to rain. That's all your name is to you.

Nothing could make me feel worse for you, then your lack of identity. I hope you find it someday, some where in those letters and if not, create a new name. Create an identity for yourself. Pick the letters so carefully out of that wide alphabet splayed before you and create something that you will find can only define you.

Doing this, I hope will help you establish yourself, as I have established myself. I hope it will help you find pride in your identity. I hope when your name is called out in class or in the middle of a grocery store by an old friend, you will smile and you will be proud that your name belongs to you.

I can only hope that this will bring you the same personal fulfillment it has brought me and that will find a sense of belonging to just letter out of the alphabet. You'll find a love for something that you once found so trivial, you will find your mark, your stamp.