Do you have these moments when you think to yourself, “I can’t write”? I mean seriously, it’s like, everything that comes out of my brain and onto the paper sucks. I think I’m having a crisis; it usually comes about this time of year. I blame our school literary magazine. I submit my work every year, and every year I have had my work accepted. Yeah, I know, so what’s the problem? Well, at the risk of sounding very shallow, possibly bitter and just plain tasteless...I haven’t ever won a literary award for any of it. This is my last year as an undergrad and I was really hoping that I might win it this year, but alas it was not meant to be. Now don’t get me wrong here, It’s not that I think that I’m a better writer than anyone else, that’s really not it. Here’s what it actually is. I get my hopes up every year, thinking, hey maybe this stuff is better than last year, maybe someone will think it’s good enough for one of the awards. Then, I get notice that my work was accepted, so my hope continues to build. Then…the letter, “While your work was very nice blah blah blah…it didn’t make the cut for the really good stuff. You’re in the book, just not in the best of the book” I hate rejection. The fact of the matter is that every year that this has happened, I’ve had to agree with the people who have dished out the awards. I mean, I read the stuff that wins, and each year I find myself thinking, “Wow, this is really good. Why can’t I write like that?” And then the inevitable, “I suck.” follows. I’m being petty aren’t I? But I can’t pretend that it doesn’t mean something to me, because it does. Anyway, now I have to go through all the shit to talk myself back up to myself, you know the “you’re just misunderstood. No one appreciates you. You’ll be famous after you die, you’ll be a legacy. Just keep at it” talk. Well Fuck! I mean it. It sucks, I suck…but…someday people will read my work and then go, “Oh, she was such a freakin’ genius” I’m so misunderstood.
Oh by the way, here's the one they're publishing. The irony...it's a Cento...yep, I suck.
A Cento
Some nights I sleep with my dress on
In the garden of waters a spirit of stone.
The cool October night
Somewhere west of the black volcanoes.
I’ve seen people die of money.
Where the hell do these people come from?
Their fathers were surgeons and vice-presidents.
Their mothers were psychologists and counselors.
had I known how to play them
had I known how to let
them play me
A clock stitched from will,
chronologs which hours to kill
and take from seventy springs a score,
it only leaves me fifty more.
But you are inside your breathing now
as you were taught. Their faces twitch
turn red as stutterers. The astounded soul
hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
she pins her sleeve to the dead
my sleeve soaked by the automatic spray
God, I have been looking for you.
