Chalkboard

Seeking perfection can be a catalyst for success as much or more as it can be for failure. You try enough, you are bound to succeed. Yet by failing you temp arming your fears with failure after failure, each threatening to bring your walls crashing down. The best of us continue to fight because we have nothing better to do. But is it not also for the joy of the fight we wage this war? In winning we would be lost and suddenly stranded without purpose, but those momentary successes keep us going like a mouse hopping from one cheesy morsel to the next. In a way that is what this poem is about, a moment of complete failure followed by the bliss of understanding and meaning.

A blank page
lines but no words
I scribble
just to
riddle the page
unclean
but still no meaning
no Madge to show me
the way
to clarity
I bleed frustration
by balling up the sheaf
of paper
an invitation to failure
A new page sits in front
of me
Only clean now
I press on
but I think
no genuine thoughts
no light shines through dense clouds
no sunshine
brightens my meaningless
day
with insight

So instead I draw a picture
I’m not
an artist
but in this picture
I see
beyond the farce

Again, after a moment
I concentrate on
another
blank sheet
somehow becoming entangled with words
obscene!
naked and alive they primp and preen
sentence after sentence
I write down my dream
and it makes sense
these footprints into my past
that I leave for others
at least they make sense
to me
and no other, maybe?
But that doesn’t matter
not at all