Writing (An Exercise In Futility)

How many have written before me? 
               How many started so simply
with the love of the rhythm,  
               and the language typed?

Or scribbled away with no hope or faith 
that their persistence, or so-called talent 
would be recognized? 

Countless dead by

Neruda’s hands
Shakespeare’s ballads
Ginsberg’s Howl
cummings’ 
broken rules, and font

How do I dare demand 
these words be my
medium of expression?
I despise every stiff and brittle line
breaking beneath the weight
of self conscious doubt.















words
from veins
opened
to
     spill
         scribbled
across the page

i keep drinking my
ink i keep warm
beneath the weight
of that forementioned
doubt

i keep drinking my ink
it's not slaking my thirst
i keep pulling it in
this ink from my pen

i devour the words
hoping they come out again
 

9 comments:

  1. You really are good.
    I mean you've got genuine talent.
    The sort of talent I use I had an ounce of.
    Fondly,
    Anna

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  4. we all need this affirmation it is true.
    but more important we have to honest. if
    we feel, really feel something that is the important thing.
    it doesn't matter about neruda or ee. you find your own language, find your own rhythm
    then tell a story.

    ~robert

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  5. Thank you.
    I'm looking for that every day.

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  6. “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.”

    - On Writing by Stephen King

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  7. Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
    -Cyril Connolly

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  8. Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
    -Gloria Steinem

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  9. Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
    Harlan Ellison

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