Blind Ambition

I’ll share one of my deepest secrets. The one thing I’ve always dreamed of becoming is a four letter word. A Poet. Yes, that was my biggest ambition. To write the world in a sea of images and metaphors. To capture moments in a dew drop. To my mind, a poet had a magnificient sense of understanding life--- He is utterly vulnerable to the emotions of daily living, where every event, even the dropping of a spoon at the breakfast table, each carries some meaningful onus.

And so is it any wonder that my first literary infatuation was with the great Rainer Maria Rilke? Ah those words. I was almost tempted to learn German so I can read Rilke in an untranslated and therefore purer form. Rilke, Glucke, Collins, Plath, and Carver. Most people get starstruck with celebrities. I get starstruck with poets. And the five above (three of them dead) are my ultimate dreamboats.


I tried for a few years to learn the art of writing. Bought a book, joined forums. And though I had a few poems published in a Sunday Magazine, I realized I lack the “voice” of a poet.

Some of those who read my posts commented that my style of writing is lyrical bordering poetic. I don’t know if that’s meant to be a good thing haha but for a frustrated poet wannabe that’s music to my ears.

I cannot write poetry, how sad. But my days gleaming poetry are not over. While reading poetry did not teach me how to write good ones, I have learned the joy of stumbling upon poems and reading the things I so want to write about but to which I cannot find the right words to say.

As the poet Linda Gregg so beautifully writes, The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.