Careerism

Lines of poetry flashing through my head all night.
Poems I will never write. A bitter man rots from within
sings Smog. The line preceding it goes:
bitterness is a low-er sin. It’s too late for the rhyme.

Bought a Boston Review and read it, each article
a reminder of what I haven’t done, what I could be doing.
Instead I took work off early and pissed the rest of the day away.
No poetry, but a trip to the grocery. Pornography.

Why hasn’t anyone picked either of my manuscripts?
Can’t they see how brilliant I am?
Instead it’s this striving, this wanting
to be something other. Perhaps I need a psychologist,

or a dose of good news from an outside source.
Perhaps I need to be saved.
The life of the bourgeois.
Werner Herzog and the

paved road, but my imagination isn’t brave enough
to envision new surroundings. Work a while
and wait. I ask myself:
what good can come of this?

Liz made hers to cream the competition,
the only way she could get heard. Forrest said
“some people get on the 1st train car”
and said I was one of them.

The only problem is that I’ve been staring out the window
way too long. Passed on the way to the dining car.
Faceless and nameless.
Thingly.

What I want is to be published, to have a book
that people can read and get back to me about.
To have and to hold. This
I think, is what I want.