In honor of a former pal who questioned my humility quotient
Upon getting my first rejection from a Medium site after numerous lovely acceptances and postings, I posted this poem from an earlier book of mine (see below).
A big part of his accusation that I lacked “humility” seemed to flow out of his deep prosperity gospel faith and enough gaslighting fluid to blow up this prideful, unfair world — Hail Jesus!
Humility
Writing poems, or writing anything else for that matter, about and for one’s self is tricky enough, but writing them for others, for the whole world, or at least that part of it that reads poems can be a humbling experience if one has that pesky humility gene. Good news here? I don’t.
Think about it. You sit staring at the white space, hoping/letting/allowing words to come to you.
Waiting for words to simply arrive that will work to say whatever it is you feel/intuit/sense in some way is A thing or THE thing that needs saying.
Or at least that You need to say.
And so you type, allowing it to flow, not forcing it because that never works.
But letting it come out of you, like blood oozing from an open wound.
Sometimes gushing, sometimes trickling, dripping.
All this in the high and somewhat delusional hope that what you end up with is pretty much what you began wanting to say way back when.
You slam on a final piece of punctuation, re-read what you’ve written and realize, “Yeah, that’s pretty close… I think… Wait… What?”
Then you revise a bit, and a bit more and a bit more and more, all the while telling yourself that someone, somewhere will likely get what it is you’re saying. But even if no one else ever will, you ultimately decide, “Well, be that as it may” (or some equally clichéd, bullshit phrase) “This is my poem and I’m done with it now. And, what the fuck, at least I like it.”
Humility, yeah, sure, okay, I suppose it’s handy for some things, somewhere.
But for writing poems (or much of anything else for that matter)…
Forget about it. Period.
