I Am/Am I?

I am a writer.

Am I a writer?

When do I go from a writer

Who waits

To a waiter

Who writes as a hobby?

I'm not a waiter.

Why'd I say waiter?

What metaphor am I trying to achieve?

That's it --trying

Always reaching

Never grasping

Always just shy

Or this close.

No awards, no accolades

No recognition

No published work

And I'm thirty.

Not an ingenue

Not a new voice

Not a brilliant prodigy.

Thirty

And my book is still half written

And my poems are still trite

And naive

And irrelevant

Ever increasingly irrelevant

Because as I grow older

I fall ever away

From the people, to which

I long to relate

I am a writer.

Am I a writer?

Sometimes I wonder

Because I feel like a writer

When one line of brilliance

Hits my insomniac mind

And I cannot sleep

Until it's written

On any scrap of paper

To be found

But I wake up in the morning

And that sentence, so profound

Is gibberish, it makes no sense

Am I a writer?

I write a new word

But I hate it

The old word was better

But no longer fits

I feel like that word

Never right, never fitting

Always searching

I think I lost my generation

Or maybe it doesn't exist

Because we're all consumed

With chasing fleeting

Fragments of the past

That we hold nothing

That's just ours

I am no voice

To that generation

Because that generation

Is voiceless by choice

Everyone has their own drum

And they beat to their content

They don't need a guide

So why do I still

Feel this need to fill some void

That if I write for long enough

Or say enough

Perhaps I'll find some meaning

They'll find some meaning.

I hold that flickering hope

A candle flame

I make believe it's a torch.

And then I'll swear that I'm done

I'll blow out the flame.

I'll give up forever.

And then I'll wake

And I'll pick up a pen.