Derek Juntunen's Award-Winning Story

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How to Become a Plagiarist

Believe your parents and teachers when they say anybody can grow up to be president, and then tack on the conditional coda, “even you.” Your mom always tells the family at Christmas and Easter about your good grades and what potential you have. You don’t see it yet, but she’s priming you for great things. It’s a good thing. You glad-hand all her friends who know your history better than you do. Your dad likes that you play catch with him every now and then instead of staying cooped up in your room watching CNN all day. Accept his tutelage on how to overcome your difficulty at catching a fastball on your glove-side, it’ll prevent you from being made fun of by the jocks in gym class. Get plastic trophies, multi-colored ribbons, and faux-gold medallions from Little League.

Play sports and study. Become good friends with every clique and person in it, but never be great friends with them. Make sure they never forget you and that you can have a solid 5-minute superficial conversation with them. It’s all you need. Secretly hate your teachers. Get A’s without trying, but still complain about homework with your buddies at recess. Fall in with the wrong crowd for all the right reasons.

High school starts with a bang. No one has been Class President as a freshman in twelve years. You strive for it. Shoot the breeze with the upperclassmen in hopes they’ll vote for you. Show them all your Lord of the Rings impressions. They like your Gimli one the best. You’re short like him, so they call you Gimli. Gimli will never become Class President.

Quit the baseball team after your sophomore year.

“I lost the love of the game,” you tell everyone. “I had more fun cracking jokes on the bench than playing 3rd base.”

Translation: The sport became a job that you realize you had been forced to do since you were in seventh grade. This is your first rebellion.

As a stipulation for giving up baseball, your parents push you into the labor force. You get a job at a nationwide pizza chain doing the same thing over and over for minimum wage. You’re the only white person in a store full of black people. This is the kind of thing that colleges love to hear about on transcripts. The whole diversity angle is very “in.” You don’t show your co-workers your impressions. You’re quiet, but you always say the perfect things when the opportunity presents itself. They call you the “cute white guy.” You feel like you’ve solved racial relations.

You get accepted to a world-renown university. It costs a Camaro a year to go there. So, instead, you go to one of its satellite campuses in a culturally-rich city.

You’ve never had a girlfriend when college begins. Inadequacy builds and self-confidence begins to shed away. You isolate yourself in your car to do homework and everything else. You socialize at the lowest-level. Nerds look at you in disdain over the top of their TI-81 calculators. High school promised the world for you. It taught you how to find “x” and why The Battle of Little Big Horn was so pivotal. It showed you what fallopian tubes look like and where Yemen is located on a map. It let you do a graduation speech after letting you feel like a God for your senior year. Then it abandoned you. You feel used, violated. You consider going back to visit teachers, when the underlying psychology says that you want to return to a place where you felt comfortable and accepted, since your current land of learning is harsher than a Siberian winter.

The first year is the worst. You made one friend. Of course you end up developing a crush on your friend, because the pursuit of love is a drug for you. The revolving door of manic depression and euphoric jubilation is phenomenal, bewildering, effervescent, and self-destructive. Blinded, you see a bright future. The future, as you well know, but choose to hide, will actually be filled with heartbreak and Coldplay songs, but at least it’ll get you your confidence back. It’s paradoxical in ways, but it’s true.

You join an extracurricular that has nothing to do with a future in politics, but you do it anyway. This is your first mature, independent decision of your life. You feel happy here, but you don’t know it’s because the choice to join was your own. Following your heart is new to you in many respects. The group has people of every color and background, and all of them tell crude, hilarious jokes. It’s a tight-knit family that can all poke fun at each other’s race; you’re all less influenced by Barack Obama than by Dave Chappelle.

Diversity seems to follow you everywhere you go, and you just fit in like you belong. You say that to yourself in the mirror. Your life is beginning to follow the clichéd narrative of successful people you always hear about on cable news and Vh1. You imagine Wolf Blitzer setting up a news package about your Presidential run by saying the words you’re thinking right now. It’s impossible to get over your ego. You still believe you can be President. You’re nineteen going on delusional.

In a country of roughly 300 million people, one man is President at a time. You have a better chance of being struck by lightning with a winning Mega Millions ticket in your wallet. On February 29th of a leap year. But there’s at least there’s a strategy to getting to the White House. That’s the difference.

Out of requirement, you have to take an English class. Working without the benefit of your scholarship, since it’s a summer course, you choose Advanced Creative Writing. A bad experience with Intro to Creative Writing the previous year left you bitter and with a distrust so extreme toward such classes that it can only be compared to Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto against technology’s erosion of human freedoms, minus the whole bombing aspect, obviously. You read the Wikipedia article on Kaczynski to make sure you nailed down the reference correctly.

Always double-check.

You consider how cool it must be for the other people who worked with Kaczynski during his Ph.D-years at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.

“I knew the Unabomber, you know.”
“No! Get out! Was he as nuts back then?”
“You kidding? I was crazier than he was. Teddy was a doll.”
“You don’t say. Goes to show you never can tell.”
“Just like Chuck Berry said.”

You sit at your laptop considering your honeycomb theory of causality when you should really be working on your writing assignment. It’s procrastination of the most mentally-demanding sort. You would be working far less brain cells by doing the homework, but you decide that considering the ramifications of every action in a person’s life, whether it be minute or serious, and by knowing all the ramifications of the ramifications ad nauseum, you can predict the future, or at least know the far-off implications of every choice. You can see around the bend, in a sense. You’re no physics whiz, theoretical or otherwise, so you instantly toss around the thought that this idea’s been conceived already.

You wonder if you’ll ever produce anything original during your existence.

You begin to look ahead at your own future, using an incredibly basic formula/structure of your theory, laid out on many pieces of paper, to try to see what’s in store for yourself. Spoilers never ruin movies for you anyway; it just makes the journey as intriguing seeing how the characters and plot get to the end. You begin by considering the delightful possibility that your self-developed theorem is indeed your own, and your genius is recognized by important people.

You’re working at the N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on your desk, something nobody else can break. You take a shot at it and you break it. You’re real happy with yourself, because you did your job well. You find out that that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people you never met, never had a problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are saying, "Oh, send in the Marines to secure the area" because they don't care. It won't be their kid over there, getting shot; Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, because they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie taking shrapnel in the buttocks. And he comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his bottom got his old job, because he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks.

Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so our country could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And, of course, the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it isn’t helping your buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And they're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it isn’t too long until he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now your friend's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which is unfortunate because the shrapnel in his rear is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starving, because every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.

You push away the papers, scribbled with your frantic amateur physics work.

You’ll hold out for something better.

If that’s your future, you figure, “Fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard?”

You could be elected president.

My Word's Worth

“For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.”

I have thought long and deeply.
I fear I lack passion.
I want a certain sensibility
toward nature and my Self
that men long dead
had writ volumes on.
My sensibilities are suburban-bred.
I possess an ill refinement
that does not bode well for Romanticism.
I can only look upon nature and think,
“This is all that is good, that is all I know.”
Beauty is truth, so it goes.
A bitter taste upon knowing
my sensations of warmth,
my heart’s more musical beat,
my soul’s soft glowing
were artificial.

When I inhale mountain air
and let the light breeze
whip and wrap ‘round,
make me shiver,
cause a chill sweep down,
I know the awe is not my own.

My careless reverence,
coupled with passive love,
created an erred deference
that nature may not deserve.
My passion was borrowed,
a truth that beckons sorrow
to rise. No part of me dies,
as no part had really lived.
Revelations of living as Keats
is no reward, since such replication
signifies a deficient existence.
I do not wish for his eyes, his fame;
above all not his insight on the untamed.
I wish only for a life of my own;
To interpret myself how the sun has shone;
the grace of which bluebirds have flown.

There will be no frustration felt,
if under secluded scope I see
the same as Samuel saw,
So long as the conclusion found
is equally personal and profound.
Until I can appreciate nature fairly,
I’m unable to ignite the same spark
to recite weighted words
and create imagery as stark.

Untouched and wholly preserved,
Forests impose upon a lake,
unbound wilderness abound,
all-surrounding;
deafening with the sound
of poetry unwritten.
I swell with inspiration,
look at the lake enshrined,
and to my Self I say,
“I love how it shimmers today,
and the way it calms my mind.”

We owe them our love of the lake;
its imperceptible subtleties,
the thousands of blues and greens
slipping through and ‘tween
one another, and the late morn’ sun,
how it furnishes the surface’s sheen.
O! The way sapphire waves do splash
with a rhythmic clap,
a smack, smash and crash
into the shore of brush and ash.
My fresh feet dig and prod,
hunting for firmness in the sod.
I slip into a state, unbeholden
of responsibilities, and envision
a young boy with my eyes, entranced
with my visage as I look into the lake.
Hours spent at ducks and drakes,
make up my memories of this place.
I trace my lineage to this plot,
going four fathers back,
who would’ve never built
upon the silt
a shed or shack.

Sometimes a lake is just a lake;
my sincerest apology to Romantics
and every manic poet with attachments
to branches and all that is not fake.
For their sake, they had a place
in the history of well-adorned verses
and deftly made their case.

I am their marionette.
That this form acts as outlet,
rather than prose or rant,
denotes their impact.
I cannot separate my thoughts
from those who looked inward.
When I see that lake and say,
“I love how it shimmers today,
and they way it calms my mind,”
I must ask if that thought is mine
or the likes of Shelley,
stretching from the past,
with influence everlast,
twisting my wrist,
as the immortal ventriloquist.

Apologies to those perhaps offended, but
Romantic recollections can feel pretentious.
Remembrances perhaps pretended,
rendered with language
of earnest urgency;
they are the saints of scenery.
Preludes and revisitations,
Inner reflections,
unlocking the imagination.

They plunged into passion
never to return for air.
With their last breath,
they dove in.
You’ll still find them there.

To see a mountain’s breadth
or plains testing the limits
of distance and description,
and be able to say with full conviction,
under my own accord,
that I’m unmoved,
is freedom.

No longer a slave to the concepts
of John Keats; Coleridge
having no more control.
I want to be able to remain passive
to the ferocious beauty of nature,
and not feel a burning shame
for neglecting Romanticism’s name,
for not feeling the same
about the lush corners of woods
that may remind me of my youth.
A disconnection will mean rebellion.
Astounding sights will still be met
with proper awe,
but as a choice, not as law.
Default revelry at the tying thread
‘tween arousing power and the pastoral
is at an end;
A rift as wide as canyons’ spread.

Incomprehensive to that mountain’s breadth,
some modern lovers sidestep depth.
They, like I once had,
observe with good intentions,
but speak without consideration,
and in this unprocessed adoration,
make mention of the great untamed
without a scrap of veneration.

See,
along the path, the road split off.
A narrow one that few undertook,
not giving the other a second look.
Unshook and able to read an Ode,
they could still think on their own.
A day would pass for those few,
a fresh brook would come in view
and they’d comment twofold,
with the power of poetry
and the reason of Pope.
These few remain still today,
separate from those who strayed away.
A jumbled fray of which I was part,
until a revelation came my way.
The path I had taken was faulty.
Love without basis for love;
Such love is not love at all.
These many see a national park,
and wrongly say, “natural,”
unbeknownst of Man’s quiet marks.
Fooled by the secret landscaping,
believing organic placements true,
when reality reveals human hands’ shaping.
They say well of what they see,
but what they see is often not so.
When they do see the truth,
they still speak well, but do not know
why they speak so well.
A Pavlovian response will tell
why such kind words are said.
The many are the dogs,
lurid landscapes the ringing bell.

One path of a conscious passion;
One path of superficial fashion.
I have left the path of unawareness,
but with one defense in fairness
to the many of my former road.
William and John and they
who put nature on a pedestal,
placed it nigh unreachable.
An air of seriousness will rise
from the pages of poets demised
that are overwhelming at times.
But of all their works read and felt,
I feel that’s their sole crime.

My heart is at rest for now,
for finally taking account of how
I did not before question my Self.
Free of Romantic influence,
the possibility of a confluence
of the two roads is one man closer.
I’ll be awed by what I choose,
recognize artificial nature’s hues
and hope that the many
stray as I did from that path;
Not the first, nor the last,
My escape is my second birth.
Previous compliments,
in dearth of substance,
disserviced the earth.

Finally, I feel the spark.
Now freedom brings unbridled mirth,
For ‘til I knew my words were mine,
My words had no worth.

Three Irises

Brown

Polished brownstones socket-set;
First thing noticed by new friends met.
Immersive hazel pools there lies
Where frequently those would have eyes

Two circular shimmering copper flints,
Glints of umber with sienna hints,
Inviting oaken tones and auburn tints.
I’ve seen no beauty before or since.

Blue

Sparkling oceanic shards
Shatter the hearts of men.
Shades of sweet cerulean
Shine like serene heaven.

Thine eyes so blue
They mimic clear skies.
Fine eyes so true
They give our souls rise.

Green

If your smile didn't win me over,
It would have been your eyes.
They're emerald gems,
A field of clovers;
You're a goddess in disguise.

I want to live in your dual atolls,
Take in the seafoam surrounds.
Wander in the green,
Dive into spring shoals,
Where only the waves make sounds.

The Green Light Fades

On strike three, but dying for another swing,
He hoped to finally find the real thing.
Stratagems composed with precision,
Conversations practiced in advance,
Every word chosen was a conscious decision.

Desperate, over-thinking always found despair.
Foolish, believing that he had so much to share.
A word could haunt him for days,
But a laugh could give him hope for a month.
He always chose to ignore her disinterested ways.

Pressure mounted and leaks would spring;
Any separation gave his chest a sting.
Fancy thoughts of togetherness never receded
The truth was always masked by his illusions.
The venture a failure that he’d not conceded.

Finally, related dissolutions sparked a smile.
Morality allowed patience to hold a long while.
Bliss brought by others’ pain.
But selfish pursuits are blinding,
His year was all in vain.

Nerves gathered, heart became a drum
Twelve months on hold, now the moment come.
Written quickly, branches in wind write better.
A handoff and a scan.
Perspiration dampens the poor boy’s sweater.

The compassionate catharsis cracks the bond.
Now sweet serenades can’t soothe me.

My fingers are finding it tougher to speak,
Of this subject I’d now rather hide than seek.
Character and writer are sadly the same.
Both still break down at the sound of her name.
Therapy found through these amateur verses;
All clichéd compositions lacking heart,
I’m stuck rhyming “verses” with “curses.”

Goddamnit.

Where does one go from here then?
Have I the energy to do it all again?
Till then, walls will know my gaze well.
Stares a thousand yards long,
Lost looks and a shocked shell.

Do I move on or stay in my place?
Where do runners go when they’ve finished their race?
How will I feel now when I see her face?

Memories of mornings will remain.
She gave him a reason to sustain
Hope, belief, and faith, in the idea of love.
It’s nice to have known those days;
Living for a year on that idea of “love.”

A Month, a Season, and Tonight

Beams across the spectrum are scanning;
Dancing to the meticulous echoing notes.
Soft spoken tones emphasize meaning.
The harmonizing, so hypnotizing,
Make the moment enchanting.

We’re the last ones, you know?
The others having fled the floor,
Perhaps an hour ago or more.
Finding haven in one-night rooms,
To put on a shy and awkward show.

Delicate sways from side to side,
Staying silent as the song speaks.
Plans upwards of four weeks
Have led us exactly to this spot,
Now open to a truth we’d prefer hide.

We know that separation is close;
Left with a month, a season, and tonight,
After which an eviction will be imposed.
Naiveté tells us we can erect a fight
To an ending which everyone knows.

My chin finds familiar grounds to rest,
Atop your head which is dug into my chest.
All the clocks have the same request:
Exit to the right, have a nice night.

Before we bid the building adieu,
We steal away, so not to be seen,
Flying through corridors labyrinthine.
Finally finding a room that’ll do,
Fit to engage in a typical taboo.

Blurs and fades of time and space.
Care and worries evade this place.
As locks fall due to quick handiwork,
A tussle and ruffle leave a ripped shirt.
A maneuver or two manages the hook,
Innocent eyes can’t help but a look.
Impish grins of what has been seen,
The rest to follow runs like a routine.
Contact nears, dashing all fears.
A bite of the lip, a nibble of the ears.
Eyes closed shut ‘til they open wide.
Gasps signal the entrance inside.
Only minutes of privacy guaranteed,
Necessitate utmost precision and speed.
The savagery is a mask for their love.
For every tender kiss; a push and a shove.
The rhythm increases, sensation never ceases.
A higher rate would leave them both in pieces.
An unspeakable feeling as they share a glance;
Two young bodies realizing a true romance.
Intimate doings with a modern day twist,
They seem to have an unholy handle of this.
Expert practitioners on just the fifth try,
He must struggle to muffle her cry.
She maximizes her grip, no scream let slip.
In the end, it all comes to a fine conclusion.
Mutual satisfaction in the dim seclusion.
Time is running out on this delight.
A month, a season, and tonight.

Our Ward

Take me somewhere else.
Away from this world
That cannot contain us.

Take me away from schedules,
Plans and a future.
No one will know our past.

A place to be
Where our hearts may speak,
In the place of poems
And others’ pretty words.

Take me far from this.
This solitude, these sores,
And these sandblasted walls.

Take me with you.
Somehow get me out
The way you are going.

These goons in the room
Who gave me 8 to 9
Now say that I’ll be just fine.
A mixed miracle in my mind.

You’re a ghost in the making
Lying before my eyes.
Speech abandoning you,
Hope not far behind.

Take me off this plane.
Free of conscious pain
And the sight of yours.

Take me on your journey.
Don’t leave me with this,
A life of your lost fight.

Your speechless lips move.
I force my eyes to read them.
“I’m being taken away.”
You leave in two minutes time.

The sun shines into the ward
On a day you will never see.
My shirt seems to button itself
As I’m severed from reality.
Into fresh air and open arms,
I’m leaving out a different door.
Survivor’s guilt has struck me.
As much punishment as reward.
It will take its toll slowly,
Eroding me from within.
Your final words were silent,
But your impact left a din.