Fearless! You turned dread and doubt into scorn
And yet I adore you. Even as you hated that lady
Her fake tits and injected lips
And I pitied her
Don’t get me wrong; she made me nervous
I was afraid of everyone at that table and relieved
That you found them repugnant
I’m not sure why I was reluctant to judge them. My piety is empty
Believe me. Born of a godlessness without (much) despair
Resigned acceptance that there is no point at all to any of it
Except that which is self-determined
And it can be hard to invent the answers
So let her do what she wants; let her give in to fear
Permanently bending to the will of fickle standards
We’re bleak and eternal together. Seeking animal satisfaction
The only thing that gives us direction
We have nowhere else to go
You and I and beggars and senators
Empty women and hollow men with shallow friends
Who mock us for our imperfections
All cascading alike, succumbing
To gravity through time
One giant, endlessly turning hourglass
Falling fast into nothing forever
And here I am, afraid that you won’t love me
When you find out I’m too scared to love anything
April is National Poetry Month and a lot of people like to use #NaPoWriMo or #Escapril to tag their off-the-cuff attempt at poetry for the day, each day of the month.
I love the idea, but after six years of flirting with it I had to recognize that I’ve been spending more energy trying to learn how to write “good” poetry instead of actually writing poetry.
What makes a poem good? Clearly I have no idea. This year, at the ass-end of the month, I decided to drop the whole conceit of trying to make “good” poetry. Stop trying to find rules around which to construct my language, perceptions, and emotions. Stop trying to write poetry for an audience.
I came to this decision a couple of ways. First, I noticed the bodily sensation I experienced while attempting to free-write a poem in my journal one morning. I had been in the grip of dread and despair (a.k.a. general covid anxiety) but as I coaxed the feelings out into my own quirky language, I started to feel lighter. What was happening? My mood improved quickly through the simple act of trying to describe how I felt about what was going on. Merely attempting to make art from something unpleasant was a surprisingly effective medicine.
A second experience with my own poetry brought me to the idea that I need to stop giving a shit about the quality and just focus on quantity during the stage of creative play. (I’d like to note that genius is sometimes born here, among a litter of joy, silliness, frustration, curiosity, and recklessness, playing alongside its siblings happily oblivious to its own nature.) I was reading through some stuff I’d written in middle and high school, and though I was chucking it all into a pile to be burned, some of it offered me an interesting perspective.
While it was easy to determine the poetry “bad” – too dramatic, too sentimental – I felt a compassion for my younger self who had engaged in that embarrassing behavior of trying. The older you get, the more humility it takes to be a beginner, so I appreciated my younger self having the audacity to stink at something she cared about. I saw in that poetry a kid struggling with complicated feelings, trying to give them purpose.
If you ask me, the quality of art is secondary to its effectiveness as medicine. Maybe a siphon to draw toxins out of the artist’s system is more honorable than a pretty thing other people enjoy looking at. And maybe, if it was effective enough medicine for its creator, there is an audience out there who will experience the same benefit.
All that said, I believe to date I have written only one good poem. It began as a stream of conscious which I pared into the shape above. I don’t know if it’s actually good, or if anyone else will be able to enjoy it. What makes it “good” to me is that it’s a strikingly comprehensive personal take on existence in general, and also it amuses me: the philosophical allusions were made by complete accident. When I read some Buddhist and existential philosophy a few years later I had to take a moment.
It’s also funny because the guy who inspired it back in 2016 turned out to be a closet Trump supporter. LOL, time makes fools of us all.
Anyway, sorry it had nothing to do with National Poetry Writing Month 2020. I just needed to post something given my month-long writing constipation. Hey, what if I realized I didn’t need a nationally designated month to marathon the shit out of creativity?
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