I often think
I'd like to be a poet
Or perhaps already am, see
I love to wear sweaters
And love the cold (though not to feel cold) weather
And quirky little, oddly shaped sentences
And the minor spellcasting of
phrases crafted that,
from a distance make
the brain itch,
Or the eyes open,
Or the heart,
Open, I mean,
Open or even break, break open,
Or even make one reckon with the fact that it has long been broken.
And also because ruminating is my forte
I sometimes think today’s the day,
The poet that I am in my essence will finally emerge
like a long dormant Cicada,
screaming, Leaving no doubt,
That I am here, and
By definition my utterances are poems
For I am Poet
And when is the proper time to admit that I stole this metaphor from a poem I just read this week called Cicada,
see:
Ugh.
Well…
It seems I’ve crawled so far outside myself,
now into someone else,
Most of the time it doesn't go like this.
Most of the time when I think
That today is the day,
That I write my first actual poem,
Unlike the hundreds I've written before,
I mean… you know the poem I mean…
The one that eradicates all doubt,
That marks the singularity of my becoming,
Most of the time I sit
Down to compose
And the words rush in
And I am overcome, overexposed
Overwhelmed
grasping out
to try to catch a single thread,
the words a torrent,
Breaking apart as my fingers clutch,
Buffeting my flimsy brain about like a tattered flag in a gale
And time passes and
I am silent and my fingers still
Minutes, hours, and days pass and I am trying just trying to find some semblance of sense in this cacophony of cognition spilling its bottomless contents into me
And I write nothing because…
what even could express such a din,
How can one possibly be poet who has this many words within…
And time passes, weeks and months even,
the verse which would have marked the point when I as poet finally begin
It goes unwritten and I'm left to simply live unsure just when
Or if I'll ever craft that verse that will have marked the point when I as poet finally begin
For now I guess here's proof that neither that time nor I arrived
These words stand as static proof enough that I've
Merely managed to mimic and steal and strive and feel my way to expression that's only for the briefest of moments alive,
Like a conjuring flubbed,
Wait I swear that moments ago I heard it speak and feel I saw with my own eyes
What it meant to me,
But now it's just this lifeless pile of words
Arranged
pretentiously.
I love this
so much