In youth I condemned myself
For lacking discipline

In middle age I condemned myself
For failing to achieve

In old age I condemn myself
For having condemned myself

To other people I grant indulgence
I don’t know what they’ve been through

But for myself I remember every thought
Every thoughtless act

Every lie like the one just uttered
An obsession with the cherished inner life

Self-consciousness self-absorption
Self-condemnation and narcissism

Which I hereby condemn
And what sentence shall I pronounce

A lifetime of falsehood mediocrity and unhappiness
Denial of the innumerable joys

That befall
Even the depraved

And in truth there are many lives not mine
Bereft of joy by war famine and pestilence

But I don’t think of them
Preoccupied by my own guilt and dread

I tried to believe that I dreaded emptiness
Because Wordsworth dreaded vacancy

In fact I dread being apprehended
While looking and acting like everybody else

And so I promulgate the myth
That I am much worse than everybody else

And fall into a confessional style
That scarcely merits the name of style

And I dread abstraction spread across these pages
Like projectile vomiting