When Can I Call Myself Poet?

When Can I Call Myself Poet?

When can I call myself poet?

I’ve no dark bar I call home,
no vial of calmly vicious pills,
no whispering gas stove in the kitchen.
I have no lessons to teach and,
better still, I’ve not learned many.
I come from a home of only moderate dysfunction,
but the bankers come from those too,
as does the mail carrier who brings my bills.

Those bills are cumbersome;
there is no romance in hunger and
words won’t keep the lights on.
I do the laundry on a Sunday,
the black leeched from the clothes,
making me ignoble as well as cliché.
Dare I call myself poet?

My sufferings have been spawned
by clumsily devious boys and cherished friends
who were lost in their own ideas,
and there were tears when I realized that
family does not have to love you
just because you share a house and extraction.
I could never use that understanding as
a tool to work the craft; too blunt,
too dull, and it doesn’t work as a joke.

I keep practical company as
the artists won’t have me.
They eye me suspiciously before
dismissing me coolly, like haughty, feral cats.
Their currency is reputation, their weapon is inventiveness,
and both are used to justify their position,
defending their right to it.

My trouble is I reek of conventionality,
but with no prospect of sensation,
I would gladly settle for interesting.
My life, then, would seem as though
it had been a clever choice and those around me
who have no use for my words
would be spared having to read them.

I’ve seen parts of the world but not many,
and each time I was the tourist unable to go native.
The inspiration would come in fits,
most often when I was without a pen,
but wouldn’t a poet always have one?
Wouldn’t they write in blood if not?
Then, I’d lose the scene I’d imagined,
fading like an early morning spectre,
leaving me to blink in a velvet swell of dark,
unsure it had been there to begin with.

Can I call myself poet if I laugh at common jokes,
and if I sometimes ask questions
I should already know the answers to?
Do I lack authenticity because
I view curses as filler flowers with browning edges,
the ones you use when the rose bin is empty?
Sometimes snow is just mean weather, and
love is a trick of vengeful magicians;
loss has no higher meaning and is
nothing more than the plight of the unlucky.

When I feel pain
I am not reaching for a clean page or
searching for patterns in the throbbing of my brainwork.
I am looking for blackness, wishing for bed,
trying to find the steps I can fall down slowly
so I can finally say I’ve reached the bottom.
My arms do not work when oppressed with regret,
and my eyes cannot see when stinging with self-pity.
Is this weakness, or does it make me poet?

And yet, words excite me
in a way reserved for free falling and finish lines;
the right one, in the right place, is a good full-body stretch
or sand coming to rest at the bottom of a lake.
Like a warm slither of oil from the top of the head
down the neck and along the backbone,
even if it goes unread, left to pale on yellowed pages.