Dan Grote

Everybody Wants to Be a Poet…
            (Until It’s Time to Do Real Poet Shit)

It sounds fun until
you count the cost,
pouring your heart out
to people you’ll never
meet, four lines of
author bio in a little
magazine in exchange
for a few silly metaphors
hung on the rafters
of the fuck-fest you
call a life, building
a respectable list of
publishing credits for
pieces of broken promises,
broken relationships and
broken hearts, searching
for the right words at 3 a.m.,
when the drugs are all gone
and the last bottle has
been drunk dry, staring
at a typewriter, one last
cigarette in your mouth
like a condemned man staring
down a firing squad, hoping
that in the end you might
find that you’re not the
only one
lost.

 

The Great Misconception of Me

It’s easy to be a pessimist
on paper,

Half -empty or never full
enough, I’m

Sick of drinking out of
the same

Cracked fuckin’ glass,
a boy trapped

Inside of a man, sent
to kill

The enemies in a rich
man’s war

Before I could legally
buy the

Booze needed to wash
away the

Cost of all my sins.

 

Dan Grote is an incarcerated writer whose decades of poor choices and bad decisions have turned into widely published poems and stories. His latest collection of poetry, We Are All Doing Time (Iniquity/Vendetta, 2023) is available on Amazon.  Contact him: thedangrote@gmail.com