I Want To Be a Musician When I Grow Up

I think musicians have it easier than the simple "writer." They can put down reality and metaphor on paper about personal problems and then put a catchy melody to it and people can fall in love with it.

Celine Dion doesn't count. She doesn't really write her own material.

Granted, the modern musician is the minstrel of age. They're lyrics, although not always poetry, are still worth repeating. The musicians that do write lyrics that reverberate like Y.B. Yeats are wordsmiths. What they say can stick to the roof of a listener's mouth like peanut butter.

With melody, an instrument, the right words and (hopefully) a beautiful voice, they can force the molecules in the air to twist around into sorrow, joy, any emotion.

A wordsmith that doesn't have the cushion of an addictive melody, people in my frame of mind, write crappy poetry.

Okay. That was wordy. Let me rephrase: I write crap for poetry. Therefore I could never be a musician. I probably couldn't be a lyricist either. I used to think that would be a great place for me since I don't play any instruments, but the only time I create anything resembling a song is when I'm by myself in my house singing at the top of my lungs about Swiffering dog hair that's collected all over the wood floor. Or cleaning the tub. Or mowing the lawn.

Those are the closest I come to comparing myself to the likes of Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

After that, my poetry reads like lyrics any Insane Clown Posse song.

And even though everyone (except for those narcisstic-types) are their own worst critics, I'm glad that I'm not posting verse upon verse of dark poetry that's ever-so-popular with the angst-ridden, teenage-types and their (self) pitied existence:

i am shrouded in dark mist-ery
and misery
my family is a sledge hammer breaking me
2 pieces
peaces will never exist in this glass bowl
i live in
fishbowl of dark everything and void
with confusion and thoughtless
contractions inside a bloody womb
giving birth to pain
and eggshells that i have to walk across
whenever i share my presence with you

It needs to rhyme:

i am shrouded
totally clouded
in dark mistery
like that of an empty fishery

and i am stuck inside
with no place to hide
a bloody, clotted womb
of anger that makes me go boom

and you excrete eggshells
enough for seven hells
like Dante's Inferno
i will burn-oh

...

I can't do it anymore. While people write like that because they feel pain, I feel pain when I write like that, but the worst part is...all that darkness that is teen angst is how I became a so-called writer. And now I make fun of it.

I guess it's called growing up.

And just so you know...I want to be a musician when I grow up.