I am not Susan Sontag

The eyes of a writer are dark and driven,
sharp shivers of light penetrating to bone,
the intensity of her luminosity formidable.
In her wake, I am merely a shadow writer.
My dull gleam, the murkiness of my eyes
is rimmed in an orb’s golden girdle of rust.
I have no choice but to flap in fretted strife
as an eaglet’s first flight from an aerie safe
but without promise of heights unimaginable,
a mere tepid air surf on a breezy spring day.
To battle mediocrity is like banging my head
through the whiteness of the plaster walls;
it hurts and damages but doesn’t kill,
the painful truth a worthy ache,
a limitless loss of dreams.
I will never be great.
I have little to say.
It’s all been said.
I’m not brilliant.
But I can write
so I can think.
There is love
for my words,
a mind leakage,
sometimes in rivulets
sometimes in mighty falls.
And I will wrestle with doubt-lies
and count the small triumphs in pride.

When I was young I was her outrage,
a porous proud and sure of art sublime.
It seduced me to the eroticism of death
I found in my coffin of burying books
and songs of elusive presence of love.
Where there was struggle there was life.

The residue of a retiring prize fighter,
bruised invisibly and inevitably, is envy.
I cannot withstand the rigors of the ring
and so stand aside to watch others box.
I am not old yet I am not young enough.
All that is left me is the drift and paddle,
drift and paddle.
Until I die.
And I will die.