poetry #6

Poetry #6
Neal Chapman

HOW CAN I HATE YOU?

I shall leave you
If I have to.
I shall forget you
If I have to.
I shall forgive you
If I have to.

But I shall not hate you
Even if I have to.
How can I hate you,
Whom I have loved so devotedly
And so unreservedly? 

title: the title of this poem at first glance, makes me think that there was a person who the author was close too, than betrayed him. it could have been a lover, or close friend, just from the title it is hard to tell.

paraphrase:  the beginning of the poem is about a person trying to forget another person. the second half of the poem is the same person saying that they could never hate that person.

Connotation: I believe that the connotation of this poem is that people who have ever been intimate, or a parent child relationship can never hate each other.

Tone: the start of the poem has a angry tone, while the second part of the poem has a more sad tone.

shift: halfway through the poem there is a tone shift from angry, to sad.

Title: The more i look at the title of this poem i think that this poem is about a parent, child relationship that goes wrong.

theme: the theme of this poem is love, lost, and forgiveness.

poetry #5

Poetry #5
Neal Chapman

Two Kinds of Intelligence

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

Title: the title of this poem"Two Kinds of Intelligence" is trying to spark conversation in the readers mind. the reader has to think what the two kinds of intelligence are, than which kind do they have.

paraphrase: the poet says that the first kind of intelligence is the one you get from being good at school, and reading books. the second kind of intelligence is basically creativity that you can't get more or less of. you are born with a certain amount of intelligence in the second sense of the word.

connotation: this poem tries to tell people that while learning from a book is good, and you can do good in life with it, you are born with  certain amount of "intelligence" and that there is not much you can do to change that.

Tone: the tone of this poem is upbeat. it says that even if you are not book smart, you still are intelligent.

shift: there is a big shift when it switches what type of intelligence it is talking about. it starts off kind of melancholy, then it switches to a more upbeat, happy tone for the second half.

title: the title of this poem really speaks to the individuality of people. no two people are the same, and that includes there not just being one way to measure intelligence.

theme: the theme of this poem is individuality in people.

Short story

Short story
Neal Chapman

The twigs brush my face as I race by, the cold air stinging the scratches left behind. I glance up to see the moon start to appear behind the clouds. my heart starts beating faster and faster. my only thought is to keep on running, try and get away from all of the people I care about. Whenever i glance behind me and see the lights from my village the word faster flashes in my mind. Suddenly, a root grabs my leg and pulls me to the ground. i stumble into the fringes of a clearing. while on the ground i can feel a tingling in my extremities. "no, no no!" I yell out loud. I look up to the sky to see a full moon staring back at me. It started with my fingers, my nails extending, while my fingers shorten into paws. the bones in my fingers breaking as they conform into their new shape. it moves into my arms, the cracking sound was almost as bad as the actual bones breaking. after about a minute of excruciating pain, i passed out. In my sleep, I saw flashes of what i hoped had been a dream. the flashes consisted on faces that i recognized, their eyes clouded with death. everything was cloaked with a maroon filter.

I look around, seeing nothing but a sunny ski above me. i look to my left, and see the tree line, thick with spruce trees. I slowly rotate my head clockwise, and see that i am in a clearing of the forest, it looked strangely familiar. As i complete my head turn to my right, I see exactly what I didn't want to see. I could see the back of a head laying right next to me. Their was no body connected to the head. i jump up and the contents of my stomach empty themselves onto the grass. My mind is racing, what have I done, is repeating itself throughout my head. I look down at my body with horror, i was naked, streaked with dried blood. I get up and started running, i was running away from not just my village, not just from the people who i have killed, but also from my very life. The knowledge that once every month i turn into a monster and have to murder people,  made it that i could not enjoy life. As i was running, i saw a cliff in front of me. i run to the edge and look down, the river hundreds of feet below rushed by with the ferocity of bear. i jumped, knowing that the world will be abetter place without me. as the wind rushes by my face, i smile. i smile with the knowledge, that i would not be able to hurt anyone else anymore. the river rushes towards my eyes, than everything goes black.