The Two Kinds of Poets

I sometimes think there are two kinds of poets. The gods and the anti-gods.

The gods are born knowing they are gods, knowing that their words are magic, that their words will be heard, that their words are meant to be sung . . .

These are the ones that know that they must be worshiped. That their words will be made flesh.

As boys and girls, they were the teachers’ pets, the golden children, the ones with their hands raised high in the air, the right answers always at the tips of their tongues.

Of course, the anti-gods are as dark as the gods are light, as invisible as the gods are visible.

The anti-gods are those who are born knowing that no one can see them. No one can hear them.

They are the unwanted, the lost, the unadopted . . .

They are born knowing that something inside them is missing, something is lost, something can never be answered . . . No matter how many pages they fill with words, they feel the blank pages flutter inside them. The emptiness. Some days a god fills the space, or a love, or a ray of sunlight, and they think at last. Of course. Thank you. But by morning the blank space has always returned.