1
There exists
No greater fear
Then vacancy
What if
My ineptitude
Stemmed not
From inexperience
But from a lack
Of content?
*
You told me once
That my vocabulary
Was too big
To justify
That all love
Was a form of
Self-indulgence
*
Architecture
Without
A resident heart
Affectation
Without
Affection
What right
Did I have
To speak
Of happiness
When I knew
So little of her
What right
Did I have
To speak
Of moments
Not yet defiled
By a captious brain
When they stood
So few and far
Between
*
That was the day
I put aside my pen
The day
That I decided
Unequivocally
That I was nothing
I lacked
The confidence
To redeem myself
So I hid
2
I drank of hemlock
And in agony
My soul from eyes
Withdrew
Hence forth
I reside internal
Hence forth
A Judas
To my muse
*
I was inspired to write this after speaking to Bianca. Many many years ago before I had a blog when my poems were selectively and seldomly shared I received a critique that would stop me from writing for years. I had a friend I shared my poetry with regularly and for many years he was a great supporter of my work. Then one day I decided to write something quite different from my usual fare. I was quite excited about it because I felt that the only way for me to grow was to push myself out of my comfort zone and take on new challenges. He HATED the poem. His criticism went from the poem, to my worth as a human being. For several hours he questioned the very foundation of my beliefs, he said I was a phony. He did not like that I used vocabulary he was not familiar with and he felt that the poem was cliched and lacked emotional depth which led him to the conclusion that if I wrote it I was equally superficial. He’d read countless poems of mine before and had never criticized them for being superficial so I am not sure what led him to believe that in one day I had transformed into another person but that is precisely what he did believe. He truly believed I was a traitor. A person of depth was never happy and never could be happy that was the burden of genius madness and misery. I had fallen. The critique really hurt me because not only did our friendship take a blow from which it never recovered (he does not read any of my poems now and rarely talks to me) but it hit on my biggest fear, the fear that I had no emotional depth. All through my childhood I had been accused of being insensitive, cold, and emotionless. What if everything I wrote was cliché? Vacuous? What if I had no substance? No soul? Without substance I had no worth. I stopped writing for years. I tried but my confidence was destroyed I did not want to write pretty poems, I wanted to write meaningful poems. Everything I wrote seemed so empty. It was a very long time before I took the criticism and used it to strengthen my resolve as a writer. I hardly remember the years I didn’t write I became very withdrawn. I offer my poems to a much larger audience now as part of a resolve to be fearless at least where writing is concerned.
mindlovemisery 