The Bad Poems

You save them,
every failed fragment
and distorted rant.

You save them on scraps of paper
or in dark corners of your computer,
the bad poems

out of joint, discordant,
too painful, to vague,
awkward reminders that practice does not
make perfect,

They are the ones that are broken,
too preachy, too sultry or silly, the ones
that never found an ending

and hang out in space, poetic stutters

that drive you mad with their almostness,
their promise,
their misguided hope that somewhere
there is art and hope,
that they are the seeds of something magnificent
or at least useful.

You go back to them from time to time,
and piece them together like a Frankenstein puzzle,
whole, but always somehow
missing the essence, and so

you put them back in the drawer,
a hoarder of words and emotion,
towards the day you might need them
again.

About this poem

I really do save all my fragments. It is a good thing computers came along, or I’d need to build a new wing to the house to hold all the bad poems on paper scraps.

Tom