Image credit: Malochka Mikalai/Shutterstock.com

I am but fortune’s fool
May as well be
Salieri
Striving
Baying at the moon
While Mozart’s melodies make symphonies
Of the celestial forms

My fingernails dug so deep
Into my own skin
I bled
From all the glories that
Were scattered
On some other head
Too easily some gather all
The flowers to their arms
Too easily

Far easier to be
A talentless creature
Surviving on my wits and not
Incipient but never blooming genius
So much better for
The most of us
And so for me, for me
If I could only see

Unable ever to reach
Nature’s golden pinnacle
But always to be
But secondary
Much more bitter fruit
Than to never strive
To be a master
To be alive

I am nature’s joke
Far better to be
Salieri
Striking out to the blessed prodigy
If not perfection
Then perfectly wild
Before the shame
And loss
Is reconciled

(c) Helen Valentina 2016