The Fear is in the Risk (Retro)

[Xlateralus]

All right.....I'll hop on the Retro Train. This one is from an ancient NaPM thread.
It's prosaic in every way, but may contain a nugget worth keeping. Fingers crossed.


The Fear is in the Risk

The fear is in the risk
of laying awake at night for poetry –
staying at home for it,
slowly steeping yourself.

But you've married it:
let it penetrate, imprint itself onto you,
transform you into someone who sees
letters in the trees, dashes in the sand.

Half your social circle is long dead,
and the living don't care for your stories,
as if you're the last member
of your family to die.

Living poets are unknown –
might as well be Templar knights,
no one thinks they exist anymore.
You dare not slip and say, “I'm a poet,”
or even the lesser but more accurate, “I write poetry,”
for that's like saying, “I'm a Dodo bird.”

They'll look at you like you've just donned
a powdered wig and a parasol,
like you're too pretentious to eat BBQ
in their backyard, too morose
to laugh at their jokes.

Best not to tell people about writing poetry.
Treat it like a childhood lie
you can't ever reveal lest people know
you're fundamentally unlike them.

When people ask, “What are your hobbies,
what did you do this weekend?”
disclose a fetish instead!
Say to them, “I'm trying to learn how
to pee into my mouth.”
Because, unlike reading
or writing poetry,
they've actually tried that.

Hi Lizzie. The poem felt very whiny until the very end which made the rest of it work a lot better. Perfect set up to the punch line, and mostly true. I don’t even show my wife the poetry I write, much less a neighbor.

It’s hard to workshop a poem that has broken the third wall, that is to reference itself and it’s author, but my suggestion, and I know it’s broad, is maybe to work in some inside jokes only real poets would know, though I know of none right now. Maybe they would ruin the punch line, and then who is the poem for?

Maybe the inside joke is everyone here gives an uncomfortable yep at the end of each stanza.

Fwiw I agree with tranquility base about cutting the first half of the fourth stanza but disagree on cutting the third. There is some finality about death though so perhaps I would consider repositioning it. But if you reposition it, having thought about it some more, it doesn’t really feel appropriate next to a suggestion to say you tried peeing in your mouth. But, it feels poignant. Maybe suggest cutting the first stanza and reworking the essence of that stanza to fit there. The first stanza seems like a thesis. Boring but perhaps necessary.