Once Wrote A Good Poem

Let me make a fair deduction in your case,
you’re young, you’re invulnerable and
you know you cannot fail. Fair enough,
we were all that way once. For some that
was eons ago, including me, but I’m not
writing like there is no tomorrow, I’m not
riding the crest of a wave, grooving to
the echoed chorus of hollow sycophancy.

But I have done something I think you should
do, I have taken time to read what you wrote.
Have you? Objectively? If you did the
complacency of your half-formed lines would
jangle on your sensitivity, the rhythms that are
at best broken and estranged would beset
your tolerance of disorder such your teeth
would itch. And you’d correct the spelling.

I found it strange that where you write one
good poem (and you do) you follow it with
twenty two or more compositions reflecting
the most pedestrian penmanship imaginable.
It is like you’ve drained the pond of drinkable
water and are dredging the rotting leaves that
line the depths of your overreached imagination.
But you are invulnerable and you cannot fail!

Perhaps it is time to take a backward step, use
the process of reflect, review, reject unless there
is a spark of something vital, new. To stay in the
vein of your last success will not make you worth
the effort of wading through one hundred and
twenty seven poems in the hope of finding
the gem that everyone knows must be there,
afterall, you once wrote a good poem.
© I.D. Carswell 2006