Stupid stupid Harold Bloom
Too goddam smart to leave me room

I’m in the uppermost decile probably
I imagine I could make a 91
A cheerful high school teacher
Or a charismatic salesman
Or a waiter with an entertainer’s flair
All honorable professions
But I set my sights higher
Conceited contemptuous asshole

A therapist once suggested
That I should refrain from calling myself nasty names
But it’s a reasonable reaction
For one raised to believe
That misdeeds should be punished
And who is to declare sentence
For secret crimes

I never read books until puberty
And then only the ones that stimulated my imagination
Science fiction mostly
Space ships and alien creatures
That I could play in my head like movies

I did like Jane Eyre
Probably because of the madwoman in the attic
I was fascinated by insanity
Bosch’s hell in the Time-Life picture book The Mind

I was well into adulthood
Before I ever learned to read a poem
I had written a song or two
For my teenage rock band
But there too my development was delayed

The current outpouring commenced
When I was 60
Turns out that mental illness and alcoholism
Are not the blushful Hippocrene
They’re cracked up to be

At 30 I embarked
Oldest in my class
Upon a serious study of literature
I was not inspired
But only intimidated
Not so much by the poems
As by the social pressure
To achieve in the art of criticism
For which I have little aptitude

And then I learn
From Professor Bloom’s book
That the poets themselves
Were the greatest critics
And I guess the sequence
Kind of jumbled in my addled mind
That I could become a poet
Without first learning to criticize

And worse
Without learning to write poems

Spontaneous overflow don’t you know
As if blank verse came spontaneously
To anybody other than William Wordsworth
Yeah yeah Milton was his covering angel
Poets are horrible liars
But they lie so mellifluously

Not intimidated
But despairing

I committed long ago
Well about 2015
To the proposition that it’s better
To be no poet than to be a bad poet
And yet I continue to write
Is it a poet’s lie or a coward’s
To say that I can’t help myself

Because when I write
The lines don’t go all the way to the right side of the page

And so I chose theft outright over silence
An overt admission of defeat
So why don’t I take my pen and go home

Despair is the one emotional posture
Forbidden to the poet
Of the American Gnostic school
Thanks Professor Harold Bloom
Anxiety is okay because unavoidable
In the Age of Anxiety
And guilt is great as the fount
Of the sickly but in some circles admired
Confessional mode

But despair is silent
And I feel guilty for breaking the silence
And I fear discovery
Like a guilty thing surprised

You don’t fear the future if there is none
No blank verse is better than bad blank verse
If only I could commit to despair