he is a failed phoenix

Today, a pretty girl asked me

"hey, zach,
why don't you read
your poems out loud, or try
to share them in something more
then embedded CSS and tired ASCII

don't you think that
maybe people want to year your voice?"


Before her, there had never been
a single person interested in the
frequency of my voice; in ingesting
the poems that I bound about my ribs
to keep them from cracking, cold
in the sangfroid of this SoCal high school.

Oh, I had newsprint and empty praise,
but who really cared about what I had
written and why, or what thoughts passed
through my mind? Who cared about me
on a Saturday night,

or when they were being kissed
by boyfriends and girlfriends;
being loved in a special way
that I never was?

People have always praised
my humility in passing --
They shouldn't, it was just
a stupid fear of speaking,
of being, of drawing
a single photon of somebody else's sun
as a spotlight.

the only thing
the really hasn't changed
between eighteen and twenty-two.

I am quieter than I've ever been
and the poems don't come easily,
and even the empty praise is gone.

Who cares about me now?
they have college degrees
and wedding rings, and they're
too busy popping out babies to notice
the insane poet who never even had a heyday.


I hate the clarity of retrospection,
because trying to be something now
feels like I'm making
pointless noises in a language
no longer spoken.

I suppose this is nothing new;
I have always been a strange man
in this strange land. Maybe I'm stupid
for wanting to show the right colors
or say the right things, or do
whatever it is you're supposed to do
to fit in with the normal humans.

Goddamn it if I don't want to try
something; and put 'better late than never'
to proof.

But hell it if I didn't look
dumbfounded at her, i couldn't say --
I didn't say -- anything,
as usual.

I'd like to make up a happy-fake ending
to this poem, and make it sound like
I made my sun rise in the east--
if only just this once,

but no.