Poetry is Itchy.

I've been posting only poems because I wanted this blog to be no bullshit. I wanted it to make no claims. I wanted it to be kind of home-madesy. No criticism. No whining. No stories. I just wanted the poems to speak nonsense for themselves, like teenagers or toddlers.

(But)

I realized that something was growing inside this intention of writing poetry. Something potentially malignant; some sort of a confession. I don't think its a flaccid one either, a middle class middle aged confession. I think its real, like when you wake up from a dream and your holding a shovel, and your hips into a hole which is your own grave. I won't beat around the bush: the confession is that i don't really like poetry.

I have a hunch that its this preamble that is going to make a poet in the first place. Poetry isn't healthy for me. I do it for all the wrong reasons, all the reasons that Rilke tried to dissuade that young poet from. Like temporary pleasure, and ego, and power, and thrill. I'm an addict, with the anxious reactive mind of an addict when I write and read poetry. I feel ill lots of the time. I am disappointed. (and I wish I could explicate how these things are true and work). (i'm gunna try

I want to be good. I don't know why I want to be good. Usually I'm not ambitous, and I still believe that what you do won't make you entirely happy. But I feel like if I am going to be good at anything its going to be this, so its my last chance. So I read other poetry to try to see what's good, and most of the time its not. Not even the ones who everyone says is. I still see through it. Through the arrogance and insecurity of it. So many poems seem to be written by people like me, who just want to be good at a thing. But sometimes, often only in a few words or lines at a time I think, That Is Good.

If I were honest, I's say the real thing, which is that the words or lines that are good. Are actually God. That somehow this author has for a moment seen through the illusions of life. And if I were really honest, I'd say that the reason I want to be good at poetry, is because I want to shred through the illusions of life, I want to be on the nail when the hammer comes down. Right in the center of everything.

But, as I am sure you have already guessed: I am naive. I never feel in the center of the heart of things. I never write out the lines that ring inside my teeth the way they do when christians go to church. i write a lot of boring lines, and I read a lot of boring ones too. I read pretentious ones, and misguided ones, just like the people I meet in my life.

So I guess what I am saying is poetry for me is like life, or the people inside a life. It's itchy. It's unfair. It's full of ideas and no action. And most importantly, it doesn't give me any of the answers that I want. But also like life, I am committed to it because I have to be. Even if I have to wrestle myself day in and day out until I die. Poetry for me is just like that inexhaustible completely horrifying energy I have for finding what my tiny stinky life is about. And sometimes, I think this is why Camus suggested it, I want to be poetically suicidal. Because I know poetry can't make me happy (or another way of saying this is: erase suffering) just like I know I'll never find out why I'm here or the right way to do it.

I wanted to write this down for myself so I can remember it. I wanted to write this for anyone who is perpetually frustrated. This is what art is. This is what life is. Until i decide soon that its not.