Evolution

I am not saving my best poems for a competition

I can't afford to enter and will never win.

I am not hiding my worst poems

for fear that someone will have an opinion.

I am steadily working my way through

and shredding the scraps

of doodled paper in my bedside table

on which my thoughts have been scattered.

Bringing it all together, I tell myself.

Although I know that hidden in the process

is the same old

clasping hope in which they were written,

months or years ago or yesterday:

this one, this one

this will clear out my heart.

(So far, nothing.)

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