Restless Nights
There’s a heart in the middle of somewhere tonight.
The poet wakes in the night, he turns over, turns back, a line of poetry preoccupying his mind. The poet is not a poet, the poet does not know the mechanics of poetry, rhythm, stanza, the poet only believes there is a poem in him. Self-delusion.
Isn’t poetry a way to undo unhappiness?
A way to find all the happiness imagined. What makes someone like me, a child poet grown old, believe he still might one day sense what poets before him sensed, felt, imagined, knowing their tropes, allusions, their ideals of what is a poetic creation?
I did not much like to study. My friends were braver, bigger, learning to write, read, and to count. I liked to be with Dad, run errands, help on the boat, or be at the harbor. I liked that. I liked the hugs, the words telling me I was a good boy. I don’t know when that changed.
It really did change.
I once had a love of the countryside, fatigued by day long wanderings, charmed, I remember, by the songs of birds and the breath of the western wind. But something else blew in. Turbulent, relentless. I began to despise the airy-fairy of valley hikes, the softness of grassy ground.
I sought something more.
Poets are not successful people. They stay in the countryside.
I studied success because I wanted power. I wanted money, wealth, fast cars. I wanted to impress, be bigger than anyone.
Today it destroys me when it appears at all.
The bridge back to poetry blocked with tumbled masonry of the mind. A tough, belligerent, mindset.
Poet, a fate kept far from me.
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