30 Poems in 30 Days: 8

I can't believe I'm still doing this. In fact, today the tank feels a little dry.  More than a little dry.  As a result, I will write something stupid about writing, something self-indulgent and masochistic/narcissistic. 

Something Stupid About Writing

By the time I was 8, I'd decided I wanted
to be a writer.  I wrote a story about a girl
who bought a magical pair of red shoes, shoes
that could make her fly, that allowed her
to talk to the animals on Christmas eve. My
friends said they liked it, which swelled my
tight little heart with a suffocating pride.
I dreamed of fame and fortune, a house far
from my fighting family, hordes of smiling
admirers, revenge on my cold stepfather --
the world proclaiming my absolute worth.

In high school I locked myself in my room,
typed florid stories about cynical girls who
wore their depression like fashion, drilling
letters on the pages like dying ants. No one
discovered anything. Death stalked us all
in too-tight boots, and my tears were
legion and pedestrian. I dreamed of the day
when I'd be free to say fuck you all, I'm a
writer, and especially to my stepfather, who'd begun
to imagine a lurid present for me, a series of
impossible sexual escapades, impossible because
to boys I was nearly invisible. Maybe one day
I could write myself into their sight, I thought,
and they'd have no other choice but to love me.

I went to college to learn to be a writer, 
I went to graduate school to put paid to that and
became a teacher, coaching bored undergraduates
to compose mediocre essays about euthanasia,
steroids, salary caps for baseball players. 
I wrote stories and poems and essays about
arcane literature and fascist poets and grew
bored and pretended I was having a nervous
breakdown.  I moved far away from my
destroyed family, started my own, dreamed of
driving into the sunset, lost, invisible. I took
three years to find a job.  My stepfather lost his,
drank himself into a dreamless fleshy mess,
gnawed by rats.  Revenge dwindled into in-
difference. I taught class after class, going
through the motions and mimicking true
love.  I looked for God and lost Her, stopped
writing more than desperate notes on the bottoms
of clumsy essays and protean poems.

In my unwritten stories, my adoring fans
speed into the mountains of a desert terrain,
carload after carload, raising a cloud of dust,
going somewhere unimaginable, now that
the words seem to have left me, waving their hands
and smiling into their rear view mirrors.