Struggling Writers

I have made my peace with subjects and predicates,

With message and purpose and audience,

With phrases and clauses and serial commas.

What I'm fighting is the pejorative use of the term "struggling writer."

All writing is grappling with a language; no writer will ever pin it down.

The only truly failing writer is the one who stops struggling.

Bits

If a bit falls in the cloud

Before it gets any pageviews

Does it make a sound,

and if it had two million

Two months ago, did it?

Time is a mystery

Wrapped inside a gordian knot

Wrapped inside the human brain,

But the internet's a funhouse,

and our memory is a mirror.

Facebook is now, on its way to then.

Youtube is always, and never.

Half and Half

I've come to a sort of rough comfort with space

'Tween proverbial rocks and their partner, hard place.

Between need to and want to I've left some regrets,

But neither is that choice as bad as it gets.

Between want to and want to, I'm no more than half right,

and the what's wrong can never be less than half my fault.

The Consumer

I have lived decades on a steady diet of American Culture.

I have chewed on it for long hours and drunk it down in great gulps.

It is in the very air I'm breathing; immersed even now, I absorb it by osmosis,

and because I cannot push it out, I am heavily impacted.

After all, American culture is not high in fiber.

Writer's Edge

Writer's block's well-known, a failure of the whole brain.

Writer's edge is much less so, a failure of imagination,

Where I step out as far as I feel that I'm able,

Swipe at ideas just out of reach on the table.

I'm not brave enough to take a step closer to them.

I'm not fool enough to take one step closer to them.

Core Beliefs

An incomplete list of my core beliefs:

1.  I am a fifth-rate poet, pretending to be a fourth-rate poet.
I have to believe it.
It's a safety net
For a man who has lived dangerously enough to learn that

2.  Indifference is the only emotion that can't be disappointed.

Another Link in the Chain

Our starched moral rectors play dismay well,

Their mouths open, aghast at the bloody mess

Made of what they try so hard to sanitize.

First, the teens are taught to be meat puppets.

Then, we throw twenty-five of them,

An unmatched set, into a big, sweltering melting pot.

Finally, we tell them to grind it out for a year.

Didn't anyone know this is the recipe for sausage?