After Class

Le cancre dans la classe – c’est moi, I am
learning to be humble again, now I know
why we must forget, halt consciousness;
cannot stand this awareness of sorrowful
stupidity without plummeting to new
depths of sad existence

Why forge ahead when all I do is expose my
lack of intelligence, how long must I eat humble
pie and swallow my words; forced to admit that
I am good at nothing? Like Ecclesiastes, I should
have been drowned or strangled at birth, like the
author of Lamentations

I should never have seen the light of this earth –
my life is a blight upon the sacred pathways of
inspiration followed by the self-righteous while
my being is an abomination, please stone me,
get this over and done with; I am never going
to get used to feeling

Like the most disfigured and horrible creature
ever created, the most unendowed simpleton
who ever gave itself airs of accomplishment,
fact is – I have none and will never acquire
some, even if I live a hundred years - we
all need only die once

Please let me die instead of dying over and
over as my stupid pretensions are unmasked
one by one – or let me scrub floors and
wash pots for the rest of my life…

3 March 2011