Love of Words

I was hanging out with some local artists on Saturday night and they were telling some hilarious stories about different arty and cultural groups - puppeteers, carnies, and "renies." But they were really complaining about the artists known as poets. Because they are undisciplined - "I wrote this on the train" - and egotistical - "Everything I do is genius."

I don't really understand that much poetry. And I don't believe that there are still existing "poets." Call me a cynic, but if someone introduced himself/herself to me as a poet, my brain would automatically translate "poet" into "crazy." But I can be judgemental like that.

So I thought it was really funny when I woke up on Sunday morning dreaming about reading a poem off a printed page. As I was waking up, some of the words came to me, as did the meaning of the poem, and I thought them brilliant in a special lucid way as I could only in the moment emerging from a dream. I pulled the creative words out of the dream world, and wrote them down on the back of an envelope near my bed. Unfortunately, I only remembered the second stanza, but the pure joy I found in the flow, structure, and meaning of the words when I was waking up gave me such an immense feeling of sastisfaction. "It IS genius," I thought! "I am a poet!" Genius! Ego! How easy it is to believe oneself a poet.