I've Decided

I've decided I am thoroughly sick of giving up before I begin. I hate failure. Not because of others, but because of my self. I can't handle my inner critic. This summer, my concern isn't to be good but to simply do. I don't work towards my 10,000 hours to master anything because I hate that its 10,000 hours of falling upwards. Because of that, I'm doing a poem a day. I will fail at that as well most likely. But I am content to try and to fail until I'm not bad. Aesthetics aren't birthed out of merely thoughts, but out of the grit of humanity. So welcome to my humanness in all of its bad poems. Welcome to my 10,000 hours.

A Poem of Failure

A war that is commonplace

Made so mundane that no news reports

Habitually hidden beyond the grasp of the public

A bloodless war

Yet none have escaped

For there is no escape from the mind when the body revolts

The war of failure

Pioneered by the pioneers

Those sweet souls who took their craft to the masses

And were met anguished rejection

The rejection not of their peers, but their own

Who knew that the stomach threw the biggest gut punch?

Who could imagine that the nervous system threatened collapse?

The price that failure wages is

The Civil War of the Self

The cries of mockers stung but the critic within sharpens daggers

Sporadically screaming of failure

The body attempting to rip away from the mind

That wretch who brought this failure upon

The body staging a gut wrenching revolt and sleepless nights

Haunting until capitulation

Meeting at the courthouse of the heart

Promising to never again try

The clutter of ideas never breaking light

From the shadow of the spotless mind

White walled asylum

Condemned to the vaccum of obedience and the 9 to 5

And in this the body is pleased

The comfort and ease of

A life presented as one of the masses

Where the mind is kept under control

The body condemning itself when creating

While the mind forms a prison break

And if you think this poem is a failure

Try risking something for once

Risk failure and fall hard

Face the riot of the body

And unite yourself and try again