This is how you know you are, if not old, at least older than you used to be: you are anxious to leave a perfectly good flip-cup tournament to get back home, where your half-finished sestina draft awaits.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to write, and failing. (How about a sestina on pot-likker? The tea rooms of Atlanta hang open like mouths…) Teaism’s upper floor had not one, not two, but three small wailing children, and the miso sauce on the sweet potato salad was greasy. (A sestina on the better woman? She knows each olive’s name as she pits it by hand…) The cafe at the Phillips Gallery had locked up its outdoor patio, and the tea-bag of chamomile was pathetic after being spoiled at Method. (A sestina on the Pacman frog? I want to choke-choke-choke the field mice down…)

When you’re trying to write, and failing, every small irritant is magnified. That blister on my left foot sticks to my sandal. This legal pad’s binding isn’t as good and gluey as the last one. It’s too hot in the sun. It’s too cold in the shade. I shouldn’t have eaten that handful of pecans after lunch. When is the last episode of The Wire going to come? How am I going to make a living as a writer if I can’t complete one lousy poem?

People ask me how to know when a sestina draft is going to “take.” There are some appropriately craft-based markers: sound, flexible end-word choices, the potential for a twist as story tires in stanza four. But the truth is that my best indicator comes much sooner, at the end of line one. As I pen in that final syllable of the first ten I either grin to myself–quick, involuntary–or I don’t. I either get a little crush on the poem’s starting premise, or I don’t. And if there’s no crush, I won’t make it all the way through. Sestinas are just too damn tiring. They are the jigsaw puzzles of the poetry world.    

So it wasn’t until around 4 PM, three lousy and abandoned drafts in, that I wrote a first line and thought. Yeah. Yeah. But I only had a couple of hours to work before a best friend’s going-away party beckoned. Jump-cut to flip-cup at the Bottom Line, complete with tournament brackets and a DJ spinning the sweet sounds of 1998 (“Hypnotize”? Anyone?). Five longtime friends in matching blue t-shirts bearing the proud logo of “Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Anyone?), lining up cups of Bud Lite on a table carefully primed with cup-slop to increase the surface tension.

And one grumpy poet standing off to the side, fidgeting with her shawl. Missing her sestina. Because as annoying as those little formal bastards are, they are also addictive. You can’t leave one half-finished. Nor can you talk about the draft, because talking about it might smother it. Nor, for that matter, did my friends come to the Bottom Line to talk enjambment. They came to sing along, very loudly, to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Which is not only an equally honorable pursuit, but one far more apropos for a Saturday night.

That’s the thing about poetry: sometimes, it makes you sooooo lame.