I can’t write a happy song
Don’t say can’t I tell myself
I talk to myself a lot
Although do I really know
Whether I talk to myself more than anybody else does

I can’t sincerely say
Oh what a beautiful morning
It is raining but that has nothing to do with it
To whom would I make
This spurious subjective claim

The situation is not that bad
The situation is this
I have habitual ways of doing things
As now talking to myself in Google Docs
But doesn’t everybody have habits

Some more than others I suppose
But I don’t know anybody else
Who fills screens with unpunctuated words
Or who makes lists
Of self-critical or rather self-condemning thoughts

Who when words don’t materialize
Makes up inexistent pmisti effrent
Who seeks permission from the greats
For slovenly slack
Like Keats’s thine ‘appiness

And I’m so tired of the sickly confessional mode
That’s why I tell myself
That I should compose something happy
But when I feel happy
I don’t feel like filling or overfilling a Google Doc

And it’s not like I’m never happy
But it’s also not like doing something else
Makes me happier
And so I sit at the keyboard
And talk to myself

Put an image in there I say
Yesterday you saw a big butterfly
So light that it barely needed to flap its wings
And when it did it did so slowly
Never a good sign addressing oneself as you

I’ve written some good poems
Surely I’ve written a happy one here or there
Have I ever written one that was both happy and good
Wait a minute
What makes me so sure about either proposition

Those I admire brim with self-confidence
Whitman Muddy Waters Dickinson
Keats in spite of everything
But the diffident ones too have their moments
Howling Wolf kicked out of the army for melancholia

I am at peace being a bad poet
That’s an improvement
Over the situation that used to be
When I castigated myself
As no poet at all

I mean that bar is pretty low
I can call myself a poet all day long
Really the author can’t judge
One way or the other
Or maybe the good ones know they’re good

I just wish I could write a poem
That’s not so damned dismal
Cakes and ale
There’ll be no cakes and ale boy
No beer and cheezy pooves

The works that I judge relatively successful
Just come to me and I’ve always known
To the extent that knowing is possible
That the way I work
Won’t fulfill an assignment

For years I’ve imagined the implantation
Of a device with psychotropic properties
A month ago I received a real cochlear implant
And when I awoke I had prolonged vertigo
Accompanied by violent nausea

I don’t think I’m a narcissist
You don’t gaze into the pool and see a vortex
I know I’m not a solipsist
I knew that the world was spinning for me alone
I crouched and vomited while everybody else remained upright

Tomorrow I’m getting the external component
They tell me I’ll hear something
But intelligible sound will take a while longer
I don’t know the point
But I don’t need an implant to talk to myself

If I can’t say can’t what can I say
And separate question
How do I know what I can’t say or can
And separate question
Who issues the prohibition or the permission

That’s the problem isn’t it
The assumption that situations are created
That is created by somebody
And that I omnipotent creator of my situation
Have botched the job

And the truth is I revise
Today is now the day for the activation
The rain has ceased
But I feel a moral obligation
Or perhaps a mere compulsion to publish

Sorry dear reader
To have left you out of the mix
Out of my cheapass therapy
It’s not terribly therapeutic in point of fact
Habitually to figure oneself a failure