Petty grievances and superfluous nothings. Whiling away your time with Shawondasee and Destiny. Clearing your everfree schedule for something old and something new; Something Poelish and something Cavendish. This is your all, your fetish. This is all there is, for you. Although you think otherwise, silently refusing dates and rendezvous. Slyly disguising your calendar, You try to trick the masses, Avoid your fame. But the one time you opened your eyes, You saw the truth. You saw that there was nothing to see. You saw that there was no one to deny. You saw that, Despite all of your preconceived notions, No one was there begging for your hand, Begging for your heart, Begging to pick your brain and call themselves yours. You finally saw, Finally could see, That there really is nothing. Nothing aside from Imposter Promiscuity.
Notes: This is a poem that I wrote on my own probably about a year ago. It is an expression of my faithlessness in the average human population, I suppose. Typically when I write poems they just come right out from my head to the page. Rarely do I go back to do revisions. This poem, in particular, is in some way directed at myself, as well as narrated by myself. Sometimes I feel like all I see when I look around, and look beyond all the gilded elements in society, is a sort of fakeness and “imposter promiscuity” to people. Far too many of them lie or create stories about themselves to try to achieve a favorable effect. However, nothing is more pleasant to me than an almost naïve sense of genuine sincerity in people. Such a vulnerability breaks down this built up view of American people as tough, perfect, madeup individuals with no real troubles at all. I would like to leave the phrase “imposter promiscuity” up to interpretation, because even to me, it has many layers of meaning. “Shawondasee” and “Destiny” are both references to poems that I had read recently at the time of writing. Shawondasee, of course, is the work by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about the lazy man and the Native American girl. Destiny is an Emily Dickenson poem that I had read that was actually untitled, but this is how I refer to it due to its subject matter. “Poelish” is a play on words and is a testament to one of my all time favorite writers, Edgar Allen Poe; while the reference to “Cavendish” was a reaction to my interest in the Duchess of Devonshire of the late 18th century. Georgiana Cavendish often wrote poems on her own while the Duke was out on business or tending to matters of State. These were only published locally within Devonshire and most did not make it out of the Revolution.