How New Religions Start Poem by Patti Masterman

How New Religions Start



I wanted to write some poetry
I wrote down words that I thought were beautiful
Enough to crawl; but they could not stroll:
They slammed the door in my face

I wrote love poems, loss poems
Poems of unrequited love, of love that took the wrong bus downtown;
My poems could flap their wings but not make it off the ground:
They threw my manuscript in the corner dumpster

I reinvented myself, slit veins, leaked bloody plasma
Over all my words, rubbed it into metaphors;
My poems began to reek but couldn't attract enough attention:
They mailed all my writing to Zimbabwe

I gashed my jugular, jumped up and down on rejection slips
Stabbed myself with paper clips,
Screamed obscenities, refuted my core humanity
Pronounced myself an alien; and re-opened all my old wounds again:
They padlocked the offices

I threw up, gave up
Burnt my words, sold my soul for pennies
Became another rumor; homeless, unwashed, beyond hope or despair:
Found out they had hunted me for weeks to tell me
Finally, I was deemed good enough to see print
But by then I had decided to found a new religion
And just forget about poetry.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Close
Error Success