One wants to be a poet

[PrinceMyshkin]

One wants to be a poet
but ends up a pimp.

One wants to be a pimp
but ends up selling stock
on Wall Street.

One wants to be President
and spends twenty-three and a half hours
every day in conferences,
on the phone with other
heads of state and important
legislators, with memos and faxes,
email and position papers
and anxious dreams, and
the other half-hour
wondering if anyone will call tomorrow.

[symphony]

I'm often amazed by how u can turn these random thoughts into poems. More amazed by how they almost always sound so good.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I'm often amazed by how u can turn these random thoughts into poems. More amazed by how they almost always sound so good.

You should have seen it before a certain person compelled me to lop off the first verse on pain of withholding her, um, affection!

[Sweets America]

You should have seen it before a certain person compelled me to lop off the first verse on pain of withholding her, um, affection!

Pffffft. You should be ashamed.:nod:
I love how the last line breaks the impression we had in reading the poem. I love it that the whole poem is emotionless, except for those last two lines. That sounds really good. That sounds mysterious too. After all, maybe I'm the only one to see a sudden burst of emotion at the end of the poem, because the identity of the person who might call is unknown, and the reason why they would call as well. I like it, this ambiguity.
Oh, and I really hope I read your poem carefully enough before advising you to take off that first stanza. :cold:

[PrinceMyshkin]

Pffffft. You should be ashamed.:nod:

Oh, we all should be many things that we are not!


I love how the last line breaks the impression we had in reading the poem. I love it that the whole poem is emotionless, except for those last two lines. That sounds really good. That sounds mysterious too. After all, maybe I'm the only one to see a sudden burst of emotion at the end of the poem, because the identity of the person who might call is unknown, and the reason why they would call as well. I like it, this ambiguity.
Oh, and I really hope I read your poem carefully enough before advising you to take off that first stanza. :cold:

Many thanks for your thoughtful comments. I hadn't really intended any mystery with that last line but rather my sense of an insatiable need to be or to feel important, wanted, at the center of everything. So his concern (as I saw it) was that he might not be as much sought after tomorrow as he was that day, and then what would he do - or be?

[Sweets America]

Many thanks for your thoughtful comments. I hadn't really intended any mystery with that last line but rather my sense of an insatiable need to be or to feel important, wanted, at the center of everything. So his concern (as I saw it) was that he might not be as much sought after tomorrow as he was that day, and then what would he do - or be?

Oh, I see. I had read it this way: he is so much into his ambitions all day long, he never stops working and when he finds himself in the silence of the night, he thinks of other aspects of life, aspects that might be as important as work and ambition, like love for instance, and he wonders about that, he wonders if he will be needed for something else than work, but as soon as the new day will begins, he will forget about emotions and go back to working hard so that he will not think of anything else.
That's interesting, now that I think about it, how we interpret poems according to our own experience. The guy in this poem somehow reminds me of someone.
Edit: just to be clear, that 'someone' is not you, Jer.;)