Chalkboard (revised)

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

I press on, but 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

Moments, hours
they slip on their cloths,
and only then do I
concentrate on another
blank sheet
of paper

Whereby confusion
left in the open,
scatters,
as my inner eye,
brightens

The words,
naked and alive,
they primp and preen,
sentence after sentence,
footprints,
through the sands
of my mind