I’ve been having trouble with my poetry, this month of all months; the worst time to have trouble writing poems.

Oh, it’s not that I haven’t been writing. I have. They’re just not very good. That’s a curse people like me have to deal with (or so I’m told): you know what good looks like, so it really thoroughly sucks when you know your work looks nothing like that at all.

We have so many beginnings. So many little lines. But none of them work together; and each breath between becomes a little doubt, sharp and invisible between a fifth and sixth rib. Every syllable a stumble-stutter over teeth, no rolling rhythm themes thrumming through the tunnels of our veins.

So instead we stop trying, for hours at a time, feeding every little doubt with a passage from this writer, with color from that artist. We deliver other people’s dreams like doctors in a theater, our own children forgotten in favor of satisfaction at a job well done.

But are they really so bad, these blasted little doubts, when they cause the overconfident to calm? After all…there is no art without doubt cast by craft.