No Rhyme. No Reason.

In the business of words
I feel totally bankrupt
In the company of poets
I suffer the role of a poor relative
My soul craves for a way to express
But my intellect suppresses
The unspoken thoughts and fears
Aching to hear themselves
My soul calls for a poem to divulge
Those which pick on my heart
Gnaw on my sense of self
But the words stay bogged
In my mental morass

My system needs the release
Of pent up pains, insecurities
That alcohol can not ever oppress
That earthly solutions scarcely address
Prose is insufficient
The poet in me reticent
And then the irony strikes me
I'm forming verses
I am spewing thoughts
Stanzas are leaping onto the page
Maybe my dormant muse is awakening
Then again, maybe not

And then my mood swings back
To feelings of inadequacy
For not knowing the science of rhyme
For not using what could have been a gift
For keeping the talent latent
For having wasted my life in the pursuit
Of the bottom line and the concerns of the corpulent
Er, that should be concerns of the corporate
Instead of feeding my being
With what is real and stirring
Losing myself in the sham and shit
When I could have been rich, pure, good

How many years have I spent
Meandering, experimenting
Nourishing my ego
While dropping mere morsels for my soul
Stunting the growth of my character
Indulging in useless prattle
Pleasing the imagined public
Whoring myself for attention
Flashing, fishing, fawning for adulation
As if they make me whole
In truth they distract from my truth
And hold my essence captive

This sadness that now escapes
The confines of my skin
Now looms over me
Almost blinding
Casting gray on every vista of opportunity
Loser, I hear my demons call me
Weakling, I hear my heart teasing
Whore, I hear my soul scream
At the failure I've become
Their evil glee caused by the past
They have played in my crash into hell

Damn, how does one construct a poem
What are the rules
And how does one keep the honesty
When the number of lines constrict
How does one work out the rhymes
How does one maintain a meter
Nobody ever taught me
I probably would never have listened
Was too preoccupied with my yuppie aspirations
Was too intent on my acquisitions
Was too cool for sappy articulation
Was too full of my self serving myths

I must have missed it
That chance to be a better person
That call to be bigger than my needs
And maybe like a comet that comes
Once in a lifetime
It will never call me again
So I resign myself to this feeling
Of having wasted myself
Dealing with the shock
Of realizing I am not as great
As I thought I could be
Or should be
Mediocrity, hey that is my greatest ability