The Thirteenth Note

They want something no one has ever done before.

So I sit with my coffee,
cracking my knuckles like a pianist
about to invent a thirteenth note,

and I write:

the moon is a coin in a beggar's palm.

No.

Too done.

Everyone's done that.

They want something no one has ever done before.

I scroll through the winners from last year.

Every poem about a dead grandmother.
Every poem where silence is "loud."
Every poem where love is a wound
that somehow, somehow, blooms.

They want something no one has ever done before,

and forty thousand of us are typing that sentence
into forty thousand blinking cursors,

each certain we are the exception,

each reaching for the same broken flashlight
in the same dark closet of original.

I write a line.

I delete it.

I write it again, slightly sadder,
so the judges will believe
I suffered correctly.

They want something no one has ever done before.

By which they mean:

do the thing we already love,
but make us feel like we discovered it.

Be new.

But recognizably new.

Be strange.

But familiarly strange.

Bleed,
but tidily,
in twelve to forty lines.

By the end, I understand the assignment differently.

It was never about the moon,
or grandmothers,
or wounds.

They want something no one has ever done before

because they are tired.

Because the wanting itself
has become the only original thing left.

And I am just one more hand raised
in a very old room,

holding the same question
everyone else brought with them:

how do I become something new
when everyone is asking for the same miracle?