The poem I’ve written isn’t good enough.
It surely won’t win an award,
be published in a magazine
or make the list of “Selected Verse.”
I don’t even know why I wrote it.
There was nothing inspiring me,
no thoughts of a long-past love,
no longing for a present-day face.
To tell the truth, I was too tired
to write anything at all,
had considered going to bed early
and not worrying myself about writing
a poem – good or otherwise.
The problem is that not only is this poem
not good, it isn’t even mediocre.
It’s one of my lousier offerings, to be frank,
and the fact that I’m even writing it at all
breaks the unwritten rule
about penning too many poems
about writing poems,
since poems about poems
shows that the poet was too lazy
and uninspired
to actually write about something
meaningful
and instead took the easy way out.
For it’s clear there’s no metaphor here
or clever devices that poets use.
I’m just whipping out words
with very little effort and it shows.
It fully deserves the rejection slips
it will undoubtedly encounter
throughout its many travels.
It will be the filler poem,
the last one shoved into the envelope
to make the submission an even five.
It will be the spare one,
the one that’s always unpublished
and ready to go
if an editor friend needs one,
on short notice,
for their third-rate Journal/Anthology,
the one the better-known poets
will never bother to send to.
The kind you don’t want to waste
your “good” poems on.
I’ll pretend I wrote it just for that,
and that I made a special effort
to do so, getting up at 3 a.m.,
stepping lightly on my toes
so as not to awaken the cat,
and making a cup
of warm milk in the process
because it’s an ungodly hour
to drink something stronger.
That after a sip or two,
I chose to pour it
over a bowl of cereal
since breakfast
was only a few hours away
and I needed the strength to finish.
That I struggled until dawn
over every word, comma,
line-break,
and if a rival poet that I know
happens to see this wretched piece,
I’ll blame an overcast sky
for its vapid state,
its piss-poor stanzas,
spoiling the sunrise I was waiting for
and a subject other than this,
saying my poem about the night
yielding to day,
about the ever-elusive muse
I nearly caught,
would have been glorious
if not for that.
Andreas Gripp
Andreas Gripp