Failed Visionary
For years I have tarried, secure
in the notion that all this luxuriating
in vicarious decay served some sort of purpose. Until
it became apparent that this extended arid preamble
had turned terminal, squashing any prospect
of fecundity. Fading without ever having flourished:
a dream unwinding, grinding
to a standstill.
I have spent my entire life
preparing to do something
that I am never going to do.
I thought that accumulating
all this learning and experience
might result in something: a body of work…
or a body. While neglecting to take into account
that I might actually have to do something to achieve that end.
An Acquired Taste that’s for Everybody
These two works of fine poetic literature available from Amazon, among other places:
THE INERTIA VARIATIONS
The fruit of many fruitless years. 126 eight-line poems on the subject of work-avoidance, failure and indolence:
http://www.amazon.com/Inertia-Variations-Updated-2010/dp/0971997799/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369175413&sr=1-1&keywords=inertia+variations
ANTIEPITHALAMIA & OTHER POEMS OF REGRET AND RESENTMENT
A sequence of mean-spirited love poems with particular respect paid to the institution of marriage. Dispiriting observations, felicitously expressed. A tonic to those of us who are not blissfully content in work and love.
http://www.amazon.com/Antiepithalamia-Regret-Resentment-Success-Failure/dp/0985508523/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369176426&sr=1-1&keywords=antiepithalamia
I am constantly confronted by other people’s works
that I could have created myself.
And I am constantly disappointed by them.
Sadly, I have to recognize them
for what they are: inferior versions
of what I could have done
if I’d been insecure enough in my abilities
to do anything.
I am not yet quite over it.
I am lying down on top of it.
Surveying behind me a wasteland
of dried-up promise.
While the lights below twinkle
with dull mocking uncertainty.
There isn’t much left to look forward to,
and the looking forward of the past has been belied.
Out of perversity, idleness, cowardice, fatalism and integrity,
I have chosen to shun my true path.
Despite it all, I have developed, in my time,
a certain unavoidable attachment to my life
and my ways: the chronic circlings between frustration
and inertia somehow comfort me – and, in the end,
I would rather be myself than anybody else.
Still, I suppose most people feel that way.
Daunted by the energy that might be unleashed
were I to concentrate on the supposed task –
of what it might subtract, exact and adulterate; and of
the gagging staleness that could issue forth, if finally
penetrated, from something so long suppressed.
Succumbing instead to these afternoons of claustrophobic
wandering and restless prostration. Committed, only
to non-commitment. Driven, only to distraction.
For years on end I have been sitting here,
impatiently awaiting potency: some explosive revelatory surge
that will carry me away and permit no looking back.
But this moment of deliverance has not arrived,
and I have done nothing to hasten it.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps I wasn’t meant to do anything.
In which case, I have succeeded admirably.
Is there any point in sitting here at all:
courting luck without design; stretching out
a dry spell; groggily awaiting the occasional spark;
comforting myself in the knowledge
of what I might be capable of,
while watching my capabilities slipping by;
satisfying myself that I can’t sink any lower.
Then, sinking lower.
Contact with anybody
who has produced work of quality
fills me with a thwarted yearning empathy,
an implausible sense of fraternity,
a melancholy sting. Regret and resentment
gnawing at me, eating me alive.
This is what you reap
when you haven’t sown anything.
John Tottenham 