I met a woman at a party once, and for some reason I told her that I wrote poems. I don’t usually tell people that I’m a poet, not from shame or embarrassment, but more from meeting other poets who were so self-consumed their work had to suffer for it.
“I’m the greatest poet of the twenty-first century,” a man said to me at a party once. “I’m the greatest poet of the twenty-first century,” another man said to me minutes later at the same party.
I thought, how could that be? I’m the greatest poet of the twenty-first century, and that’s why I don’t tell people I’m a poet.
But somehow it came out to this woman that I was one of those.
“That’s too bad,” she said to me.
I got to the bottom of her comment. I found out her father was a poet and she had had a hard life because of it.
Somehow she and I overcame the obstacle of poetry and spent that night together, and subsequent nights.
She confided that she was a writer herself, but we agreed not to read each other’s work.
On the few occasions that I did let her read my writing, she hammered so hard I never asked her again. She butchered my work with her refined English and perfect grammar.
She keeps a journal. I sometimes wonder what’s inside that journal of hers. I’ll see her writing in it, guarding it. She’ll write for hours. She’ll sit on the bed and write and write and write. It’s impressive. What can she possibly be writing about?
I’ve learned my lesson about reading other people’s journals. I did that once before to a girl and paid dearly for it. I don’t know what got into me. I lost my senses, I guess. The curiosity was too great and I broke down.
I hope I don’t lose my smarts this time. But I do think about that journal from time to time. For all I know, that journal is filled with beautiful words, words that make the wind blow and the sun shine, words that tell a good story.
It could have the solution to all the world’s problems and my friend could be the greatest writer from this century or the millions of centuries that preceded it.
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