I thought he was great. (He thought he was small)
His damaged self-image no longer stood tall
The little old poet lived his life in a dream
His scratchings expressed a monotonous theme.
Few people would read the hard-written lines,
The handful who did saw the pitiful signs
Of a poet obsessed with declaring his pain –
The shrewd and the clever marked the writer insane.
Compelled from within to blurt out what he found
In the depths of his mind (now regarded unsound),
He suspected his writings were close to the norm
for a largish percentage of those who are born.
It was many years on I discovered his script.
The most powerful pages were tear-stained and ripped,
Discarded, unwanted, rejected, unread;
For all these decades they’d been silent and dead.
As the reader moved slowly from one line to the next,
Freeing his spirit to dwell on the text,
He perceived, not the agony, aching, and strife,
But the heart of a poet exploding with life.
The depth of emotion so much like his own
Reached into the reader as he sat alone,
Established communion with the battling bard
Who’s path to my door had been hauntingly hard.
Oh you who are reading my writings today,
Are tempted to try them and throw them away,
Remember there’s more in the gaps in-between
Than ever there is where my pencil has been.
