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.