Dozens of crumpled papers pile up, the trash bin an agonizingly teasing confirmation of my own inadequacy.
I sigh and put down my pen, hands stained with ink like the blood of the ideas I’ve killed before they could bloom.
Nothing is good enough— nothing will ever be good enough. Too pretentious. Too provocative. Too dull.
And so poetry slips through my fingers, the very idea put to death along with so many of my own.
But poetry doesn’t have standards. Nothing has to be perfect, nothing has to be good enough, or even supposedly adequate.
And so I look upon the pages of discarded poems, the state of them a story of its own— a poem of its own.
Even at their least inspired, a poet cannot help but take part in their craft, each discarded thought a line in a poem all its own.
