Delusions of Mediocrity

 I remember when I wrote my poem

"Delusions of Mediocrity." It was rejected by several

fine magazines. It was part of my "bad poem" project

so the editors were not wrong. They could have realized 

that it was bad-on-purpose, not bad because I couldn't do 

any better--or not--but it didn't matter. They were

right either way.

                  I don't care anyway for

"fine writing" or lyric epiphanies, and have poor

powers of observation. I can't carry a notebook around

and observe interesting things. That's 

not how my mind works. Mostly in poems, I've found,

the interesting things in life don't fit, they get left out

along with the boring stuff that holds everything together.

For example, I suffered from horrible "earworm" as a kid, with

the line from a translation of Breton, "Jersey Guernsey 

in sombre and illustrious weather." And with the opening of 

Pound's "Seafarer": "May I for my own self / song's truth reckon /

journey's jargon." The suffering was intense 

and persistent, but I had nobody to complain to

since it was of my own doing. (Now this example,

I don't know if it is interesting or dull,

or whether it belongs in this poem at all.) 

                                Meditation cured my earworm

many years later. There are still tunes and phrases 

rattling in the rafters, but I don't fear them

anymore. Perhaps the syndrome is the fear of catchy 

musical and verbal cadences, not the words, 

harmless in themselves.

Regret for the past is pointless, I decided 

in a fit of insomnia last night. Regret implies that 

we can do better now--something far from certain. 

We should "regret" only the present, but try to change it 

at the same time, by making it better, somehow. 

Does that make any sense to you?

                      So much introspection is without value, 

anyway, like keeping score

for a game no longer being played, moving pointless 

mental tokens from one column to another, then never being able

to come up with the same count on successive attempts. 

You get the idea. 

                I spend years introspecting in the wrong way

without gaining much insight into myself or others. 

                                                    Insomnia too 

is a name for something not bad in and of itself. (Sleep

comes as a relief, sure, but we never experience 

that relief, waking up groggy much later.) After all,

insomnia gave birth to this poem, "Delusions of Mediocrity," a second

attempt to write a poem with this brilliant title. 

                                                       Once I read

an article about how not to be a mediocre jazz pianist, but

since "mediocre" means average, then for me 

that would be a vast improvement, right? 

                                    A Chopin waltz 

lies abandoned on the music stand, 

then it is not, as I come back to it again. It is not 

difficult, maybe, but it is unforgiving. Why do my fingers

fly, improvising over "Bemsha Swing" but stumble over themselves

here? Yet I can't play those bebop clichés that sound so good

when other people play them.  

                          I think of my childhood fantasies. 

I wanted to play jazz piano, publish poems 

in magazines (see above), and have a wife who wore lipstick. 

Nothing too ambitious; most of that I've done, though

not exactly in the way I thought it would work out.

None of those things is really what I thought it was

going to be. They are subtly different, but in a way that 

robs them of some portion of their inherent joy

and satisfaction.   

Sometimes I wonder, too, why bacon

sizzles in the pan. I know sound is vibration

but what is vibrating here, the grease? I understand

how a drum makes noise, two drum heads vibrating 

sympathetically and making the air inside 

hum too (when struck with stick), and then

sound waves emanating from there.

                                     The bacon, though,

I do not understand, I'd really like to know, but

it seems dumb to ask.