I’m done with being
at all creative

It doesn’t pay in any way
even with the obvious
lack of financial incentive
known to all

But the emotional
and spiritual payoffs
that have been ascribed to it
are in truth nonexistent and

in this forest where the leaves
are nearly wealth and 
nearly perfect there is no exchange
as what is theirs remains theirs

and here I am with poems and 
sketches and of course
the odd guitar riff
Once again there is nothing
to be taken from this work

It is all about what you give
and what you pretend to receive

So while I do not object to giving
I must confess I’ve given much
and must conserve my remainder

because I’m certainly old enough 
to understand how little
I’m likely to truly receive

I have certainly had worse days 
and some of them felt like this one,
like the world was sneering at me
and my feeble attempts at competence
while also crushing every good moment
for others as well in a tempo of
damage increasing worldwide.

Here I am thinking I’m mired
in yet another catastrophe
that in the long run will be minimal
compared to what will be true misery
for so many others.

I should be thankful instead
for such small problems as these
that feel like knives now,
like scalpels cleaving into me.

I pull it together.
When this is done,
what will I have left?

Gratitude, resolve,
relief; I hope as well 
that if I am worthy

I can rest in the knowledge 
that I did my part 

to brush aside my own pain
and do what I could
to pull those less fortunate
from the teeth
of this sneering world.

Again upon rising I do the simple math
of how many steps I will need today
to get by and through without
drawing the wrong attention
from the right people.

I don’t care about them much as individuals
but I allow their gaze potency,
even when I can only imagine 
what of me it brings to their minds.

It was a good sleep, a good dreamless night,
then I woke to this fear as I often do.
I woke to the notion that I am a mistake,

and that this day will pile on
affirmations of that fact
until I fall again into the dark
and manage to forget
who I think I am.

Not even six AM
and it already feels like
one of those days.

One of those days
you will look back upon
a few days later
and shake your head
and say it right out loud:

man, that was
one of those days.

And of course you
will know what you mean,

but someone listening
will misinterpret it certainly
and think it was an angering day
or a saddening day

when all you will be trying to say
is that the day felt stale and familiar
from the beginning, yet another day
like all of them had been lately,
and it was neither
a good day nor a bad day,

just one of those nondescript days
where you could have tossed it from a window
into a dirty pile of similar days in your back alley
and ten minutes later you’d be unable
to distinguish it from the others
despite the fact
that it had just happened
and it ought to be fresh enough to stand out.

If you tried to explain all that to that listener
they would be bored and walk away muttering.

If you tried to explain it to yourself —

how you came to have
such a monstrous pile of boring days
piled up out of sight of everyone 
behind the facade where you live —

I think you’d stop talking,
choke on words, eventually scream.
You would scream into a pillow,
into a closet, into a glass or a mirror,

thus completing
yet another one of those days.