Yevtushenko Poem

This poem feels right, despite the fact that it seems to preach against everything every therapist I've ever had has tried to tell me. I love "It takes real talent not to dread being terrified/ by your own agonizing lack of talent." And "Indispensable is the cowardice to be cruel/and the observation of small mercies..." And, of course, the phrase, "unprince yourself."

Disbelief in Yourself is Indispensable

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

While you're alive it's shameful to worm your way into

                                                                            the Calendar of Saints.

Disbelief in yourself is more saintly.

It takes real talent not to dread being terrified

by your own agonizing lack of talent.

Disbelief in yourself is indispensable.

Indispensable to us is the loneliness

                                                   of being gripped in the vise,

so that the darkest night sky will enter you

and skin your temples with the stars,

so that streetcars will crash into the room,

wheels cutting across your face,

so the dangling rope, terrible and alive,

will float into the room and dance invitingly in the air.

Indispensable is any mangy ghost

in tattered, overplayed stage rags,

and if even the shots are capricious,

I swear, they are no more capricious than those who are alive.

Indispensable amidst babbling boredom

are the deadly fear of uttering the right words

and the fear of shaving, because across your cheekbone

graveyard grass already grows.

It is indispensable to be sleeplessly delirious,

to fail, to leap into emptiness.

Probably, only in despair is it possible

to speak all the truth to this age.

It is indispensable, after throwing out dirty drafts,

to explode yourself and crawl before ridicule,

to reassemble your shattered hands

from fingers that rolled under the dresser.

Indispensable is the cowardice to be cruel

and the observation of the small mercies,

when a step toward falsely high goals

makes the trampled stars squeal out.

It's indispensable, with a misfit's hunger,

to gnaw a verb right down to the bone.

Only one who is by nature from the naked poor

is neither naked nor poor before fastidious eternity.

And if from out the dirt,

                                  you have become a prince,

                                                                          but without principles,

unprince yourself and consider

how much less dirt there was before

when you were in the real, pure dirt.

Our self-esteem is such baseness...

The Creator raises to the heights

only those who, even with tiny movements,

tremble with the fear of uncertainty.

Better to cut open your veins with a can opener,

to like like a wino on a spit-spattered bench in the park,

than to come to that very comfortable belief

in your own special significance.

Blessed is the madcap artist,

who smashes his sculpture with relish --

hungry and cold -- but free

from degrading belief in himself.