Acrostic

A little bit clever, a little bit fake,
Contrived, unauthentic, is this what you make?
Random words strung-together, that isn't a poem,
Order and structure is not gonna show 'em,
So you think you can write? You think you're not bad?
Take a look at yourself, you'll see you're just sad.
I can't understand why you make yourself try,
Can't you see that your talent's a self-spouting lie?

I've been ever-so-slightly obsessed with acrostics, lately--it's all about trying to say something, while sticking strictly to a meter and, usually in my case, I try to rhyme it as well... It's getting a bit old, I think. I need to find something else to do. Not that I'm in such a poetry mood, at the minute. I am also working on a couple of short stories, and that's actually going a bit better for me.

It's just... I think you know what you are, deep down. If you have to define yourself in one word, a noun, you can, and if I were defining myself in that way, I would use the word 'poet'. Whether I'm any good or not is irrelevant, for the purposes of this blog entry; the point of poetry is to feel, to see, to look around at the world and all its inhabitants and *respond* from the innermost part of yourself. That's not just what I do, it's all I can do. I wouldn't know how to live, if things didn't continually kick me in the guts, and blind me with their beauty, and smash my heart to pieces. That's just the person I am, I feel all of that, more often than I think most people could handle it, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I think what I'm trying to say is that I'm very sensitive. Certainly, I am. Does that make one a poet? Maybe not on its own, but I'd like to think I have a reasonable grasp of the English language, and even the knack of occasionally throwing together an original line or two. Maybe, combined with my aforementioned talent for violent emotion, that's enough ingredients to bake a decent poetry pie.

Even if it's not, I don't have a lot of choice in the matter. If I stopped writing, I would go stark raving mad. There's too much floating around inside this arguably crazy mind of mine (mostly all those loose screws, right, haha) for me to not take time to get *some* of it out, down, into the wide world and out of my skull. If the literary results are less than superb, well, at least I'm keeping my fragile grip on sanity (for the time being).

I do suspect that I'm better at writing short stories, than I am at writing poetry. Which would be just my luck, really... have you ever noticed how some people are quite good at a few things, but they fall a little short of the mark in the one area they *really* want to excel in? Edgar Allan Poe is a good example--he thought that poetry was the highest form of literary expression (so I was taught in highschool) and he was forever trying to perfect his craft. But if you ever *read* a handful of his poems, and then put them next to any one of his short stories, you'll see that he was a master of suspenseful, dramatic prose, and a bit of a 12-year-old girl when it came to writing verse.

Just a sidenote, with maybe a bit of a hypothesis thrown in; he also liked word puzzles, and he used to send in cryptic messages/poems/etc to local newspapers, to see if anyone could crack his secret codes--in the end, he usually wound up mailing in the solutions himself. Too clever, was Edgar Allan, and arguably too logical to really give in to the romantic, imaginative, artistic side of himself, and write a truly outstanding bit of whimsy. He was much better at accessing the darker, more macabre, but potentially more cerebral part of his mind. (Don't ask me why the darker part of a person's mind should be the more cerebral bit, I just reckon it is--I think light, floaty, airy parts of a person's psyche tend to be found in a softer, more emotional place.)

And that's maybe my whole point. Perhaps, like Poe, I'm too stuck in one part of my brain, to make good use of the other. Perhaps I am doomed, to be a poet in spirit, but a story-teller (novelist, one day?) in actual yield.

Mind you. If I ever write a short story that's as good as The Tell-Tale Heart, or The Cask of Amontillado, or The Fall of the House of Usher, I will shit my pants with delight. I think I'd probably sprout wings and fly, if I discovered an ability to write *anything* that well. I'd certainly be enormously pleased with myself, and I wouldn't bitch about my substandard poetry.

But deep down, I would know. Crappy acrostics notwithstanding, *I* am a poet.