The feel when you came up
with an original way
to encapsulate your feelings on a subject
and you put them into a poem
and then you randomly glance
through your back catalog
and find that you wrote almost the exact piece
a few weeks back
thinking it was original then
but you are so myopic
that you forgot all about the you
of that yesterday
and goldfish-bowled your way
into believing your thoughts today
were brand-new and unprecedented,
just like you did last time.

The feel when you realize
how small you are
in the face of your past
which doesn’t even take into account
everybody else’s past
and the possibility
that the original thought
you already experienced
has probably been experienced by everybody else
a dozen times each
and you’re even more unoriginal
than the repeated use of the word "original,"
avoiding any synonyms at all,
would imply.

The feel when you wonder
if you meant "infer"
at the end of the last stanza,
and THEN wonder
if you really meant "stanza"
in the line above
and not "paragraph."

The feel when
everything
is doubt
?