Are You ...

    Are You ... is a poem that I wrote prior to a vacation, where I was in a cloudy mood and striving to climb out of it. I was struggling to see not the negatives of existence but the positives, so, I envisioned a poem which started out negative and rose stanza by stanza through to the positive.

    There are six stanzas of four lines each. Each end word is the same rhyme and no end word is repeated! Each first line of a stanza begins with the title of the poem, "Are you". There are three 'negative' stanzas, each of the three becoming less and less negative, and then three 'positive' stanzas, each of those becoming more and more positive. The manner of conveying information and imagery, even as it changes, is maintained through each stanza.

    The structure of six stanzas has been broken up into six chapter breaks, but each stanza has had its lines split-apart in order to preserve the intent (the pacing) of each line, and thus each line may be given its own page; there may be instances, however, where managing the evolution of the poem in your mind, some lines have been split into multiple pages, or, multiple lines of a stanza remain on the same page (making it so a chapter is not necessarily equal to the count of lines of a stanza).