Bad Poets
Some days I sit to write
and nothing comes.
Not silence.
Silence I could work with.
This is the sound of a mouth opening
and forgetting
what it wanted to say.
I have been forgetting
a lot lately.
Most days I don’t even try.
I circle the desk
like visiting someone
in a hospital.
I sit. I stare.
I leave before anything real
gets said.
I tell myself tomorrow,
and tomorrow believes me
every single time.
The tea goes cold.
The screen stays white.
The poem I almost had
at 3 AM last Thursday
has packed its bags
and I don’t know
where it went.
I don’t know where
any of them went.
There is a specific kind of pain
in being full of words
and unable to speak.
It lives in the chest.
Not the heart. Lower.
The soft place
between breathing in
and not breathing out.
Some days I want the world to know me.
I want to write one line
so true
that a stranger reads it on a train
and has to close the book
and sit with it.
I want someone, anyone,
to read me
and feel less alone.
Some days I just want
to feel less alone.
Other days I want to vanish.
Sit in a window.
Watch the rain say
everything I can’t.
Let the world write itself
and stop pretending
I have anything to add.
I read Bukowski and he doesn’t care.
He writes about a beer going flat
like it’s the saddest thing
that ever happened,
and somehow it is.
He doesn’t rhyme.
Doesn’t try to.
He bleeds on the page
and calls it Tuesday.
I want that.
Not the drinking.
Not the women.
The not caring.
The way he walks into a poem
without knockin
Ginsberg screamed
and they called it literature.
Plath burned
and they called it confession.
Sexton opened her body on the page
and they called it too much
until she was gone
and then they called it genius.
None of them were good
the way they teach you to be good.
Clean. Careful. Musical.
They were good
the way a wound is good
at reminding you you’re still alive.
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Some nights the poem comes
like a wave I didn’t see.
It knocks the breath out of me
and I write so fast
my hand cramps
and I don’t stop
because if I stop
the thing will go back
to wherever it hides
when I need it most.
And then there are the other nights.
The blank ones.
Where I sit
and the cursor blinks
like a heartbeat that isn’t mine.
I used to think the
blank nights meant I wasn’t a poet.
That real poets don’t go dry.
That the ones who matter
write every day,
the way the sun rises,
without thinking about it.
But the sun doesn’t rise.
We just spin.
And some days
you face the light
and some days you don’t
and both are part of the turning.
I am a bad poet.
I don’t write every day.
I don’t rhyme when I should.
I feel too much on Tuesdays
and nothing at all on Sundays
and I have poems in me
that may never find their way out.
That’s the part
that makes me want to cry.
Not the not writing.
The knowing.
Knowing they’re in there.
Knowing I might not
get them out in time.
In time for what,
I don’t know.
But there’s a clock somewhere
and it doesn’t care
about my bad days.
But the guilt.
It doesn’t scream.
It just sits at the foot of the bed
like a dog
that’s been waiting all day
for you to come home
and you came home
and didn’t touch it.
The guilt is the poem
I haven’t written yet,
pacing the hallway,
waiting for me
to open the door.
I’ll let it in.
Not today.
Maybe not tomorrow.
But I’ll let it in.
And when I do,
it won’t be clean.
It won’t rhyme.
It won’t be good
the way they taught me
good is supposed to sound.
It’ll be mine.
And that will be enough.
