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If Some Of My Adolescent Failures Could Speak
We are the failed aspects of his failed self.
We occupy a shadowed, dusty shelf:
typescripts---a seeming multitude of pages
telling the variations of his rages.
Sheaf after sheaf: each one is a full novel;
and, as a verbal construct, like a hovel---
full of poor grammar and elliptical;
no better in the part than in the whole.
He hopes that each will bear the designation
of science fiction: his imagination
knows neither. All of it is wishful thinking,
just like an odor that can be called "stinking."
Of science and fiction, he is a botcher.
In a year, fiction is squelched; reality,
newly versed, will bring him the name Starwatcher:
he will find that his words more easily
assemble to the forms of poetry.
Starward
I believe it is a valuable
I believe it is a valuable skill for a poet to make us see ourselves in a poem. This innovative introspection does just that with admirable honesty and resonance. Making the past failures an entity in itself and correcting that past self retrospectively was a clever construct, and it was very cathartic and rejuvenating to see the positive result of all that trial and error: It created the superb poet that you are.
A portrait of inner victory. Well done.
Thank you. I realized, while
Thank you. I realized, while reading your comment, that I had fouled the 14th and 15th lines---which I have now corrected. They do not change the poem, just make it a little more cosmetically "fit." But thank you for understanding, and so gracefully explicating, the metaphor that I pursued.
J-9th94