I wrote a poem today.
Not this one of course.
It was one of those poems like
the one in Big Magic where it came
swooping across the meadow and
the lady had to run fast as she could
back to the house so she’d be ready with
pencil and paper and she only just
made it in time, catching
it by the
tail.
Yeah.
And it was perfect.
Like the Percy one
that Mary Oliver said came all in one
piece without needing one
word changed.
I wrote it all morning
lying in bed, feeling into
how it feels when you really nail it.
Imagining I’d nailed it.
Seeing it in the New Yorker
or on Medium’s home page
with 1.94K claps.
Lonely literary masturbation.
And then I remembered.
I have to get up and
sit at my breakfast table and
hold a pen in my arthritic hand and
put it to paper, and
write this rough approximation,
this sad, ordinary disappointment,
this truer one instead.
But then I can really say
I wrote a poem today.
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