What to do?
What to do after giving up?
Take a breath
and recognize it doesn’t hurt (that much).
Refuse poetry. Turn away from its Sirens.
Find the warm satisfaction in a standard day’s work, sure pay.
Focus on simply having a good time. No plans
to pressure yourself into becoming a best-selling author (from dust).
What to do after giving up on your dreams?
You should look for a job. Use that old resume
and go back to figuring out if you can convince a real place to work with you.
This time the money matters.
Gut it out.
Maybe recognize the dream was always just something to trifle with.
To talk about at work parties, to sound like a girl with real goals.
The secret to a good life is fun in the now and now and now and so on.
All that postulating and pontificating
about authors’ names and attributes was a waste.
There are rich moments when I’m tuned to the muse and in the melodies
I create life, there and there and there. But other moments
when it’s forced and embarrassing.
What will I tell my mother, my brother, my Facebook friends?
There is still a sting
in what they always knew
in what they saw coming all along.
That’s what you do right before you give up on a dream.
Let go of what others think of you.
Freefall into the assured conformity.
Turn it all into a pleasure project
the hobby you always knew.
Guess about how you’ll meet
new normal people and have a normal schedule,
and go back to a modicum of an old life where you had alone time inside your own head and weren’t always trying to strike a contagious sound while hoping for a decent payout as you hopped from job to job to keep milk in the fridge and clean diapers on bottoms while doing what?
Writing.
That’s what you do.
