The cost of admission: another shitty poem

You didn’t like my poem
and came here to call it “trite garbage.”

I won’t flatter myself that only one person could dislike my writing. The truth is simpler: I manage that quite capably on my own. There are pieces of mine I revisit the way one checks a bruise: curiously, and with mild regret (at best).

Every so often, I catch a gorgeous thought by the ankle. Even more often, it wriggles free and I recognize the exact moment I almost had it and let it slip through my hands. 

The poem you found is one of those small failures—recognizable to me long before you named it and already on my internal watch list for crimes against elegance. 

It was bad. 

I knew it was bad. 

I posted it anyway because I understand something important: I am not above being bad at something I love, even something as central to my self-concept as “writer.”

Bad writing is not a bug but a feature of the practice. It is the cost of admission for anyone actually doing the work in public.

This blog exists, in part, because I am trying to fall back in love with the work itself; not just the rare, polished moments that survive it.

To love anything openly — a person, a practice, a stubborn half-finished thought — is to risk looking foolish to someone standing safely at a distance. 

By that I mean: you think you can hurt me? I once wrote to Juan Paul Brammer’s advice column, Hola Papi, asking how to get my man back (& he published his response!), so my relationship to public dignity has long been… flexible. 

What interests me more than your opinion, though, is the small urgency that moved you to log in under a borrowed name to deliver it. There’s something almost tender about that level of investment in a stranger’s rough draft.

Criticism is sometimes the only participation the truly frightened will permit themselves.   

At any rate: thank you for reading closely enough to be annoyed and for giving me the opportunity to write something today. The algorithm, if nothing else, is grateful. 

(And should you find yourself with further critical energy to expend, you’re welcome to mosey over to the terrible poem I wrote about Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. I do aim to provide a range of disappointments.)