Your Writing Isn’t Good Enough
They said my writing might have some promise.
That just once, they saw some raw emotion.
I guess I should have gutted myself instead.
I should have written the words
Assault.
Coercion.
I thought poetry was supposed to be pretty.
Maybe the problem is that the pretty things are also empty.
They are all shiny surfaces, polished and perfected for show.
But then, when you try to peer into them there is nothing there.
It’s all cobwebs and dust.
Maybe there was never anything there in the first place.
Maybe I have always just been grasping for straws.
Such a pretty package
But rotten to the core.
Or maybe it’s not that I am rotten.
Because in order to be rotten, that would mean you had to be ripe first.
Ready.
Whole.
Alive.
I am none of those things.
So am I nothing then?
The outside is here,
And it’s trying.
I polish it and polish it and polish it
But now the surface is starting to wear thin.
Finally, someone has called me out on it.
There was never anything worth seeing here within.
