i am a hundred and forty pounds of ink, look at me

i was at this slam poetry thing last year in ol' baltimore, and a man in his thirties came up to spit, he started yelling about being a writer. his poem was driven by anger, his pauses were breathes between punches. he was a bitter angry intelligent driven depressed man. being in my youthful unindependent state with no financial responsibilities and no outside expectations to hole me in, i was free to label this man a failure. he was writing about how he lost. his metaphors and alliteration and sometimes beautiful language were all about the great game of the pen, and how he was in the process of losing this great game. the thing is, he wasn't saying he lost. he was saying that to be "a writer", you had to lose again and again, and only then are you really a writer (or an artist for that matter). only after failed manuscripts and marriages and infrequent orgasims, only when you were pitted against the wall with just your typewriter, then evidently you had what this man had, which was happiness. The type of happiness that people use to justify why they keep doing what they do, why they write, why they try to get the last word. My question in my head then, and now, is why did he have to tell me this? Why did he have to go to a coffee shop in John Hopkins and yell at me about how hard art is? He seemed very sure that the path of his life was the inevitable path of art itself- so why on earth did he have to spoil it for me, and take away my dream that art and expression and all those things don't bring you down to yelling stanzas, rather doing something beautiful? their was competition in his voice i could hear it. i knew if i responded to one of his rhetorical questions, he woudl shut me down with his bank statement and old copy of walden. he would call me a disgrace to writers everywhere, his bullet would be words that i wasn't allowed to use: writer, rent, real life, tragedy. he would call my shit dreamy and weightless and then storm out with an angry flurry of similies. he would be the other team, the better brand of gun, the expected nothing we live for.
in the car that night on the way home, we listened to music. everything was ok.