"overconfidence" poems
she asks at last,
is this one for me
“of course it is,
was waiting for visualizing
the Oh,
when I heard
you stumbled into it”
she then confesses,
she has
a “tendency to stumble”
without an explanation
her answer is in her manner subtle,
that instantly invigorates,
so decidedly her style,
her answer,
raising more questions,
defeating the illusion of
anybody masculine overconfidence of the challenger
she puts the ”oy” in coy,
deflating my upper-handed attitude,
with an answer tantalizing and hinting,
so simple, it explains everything
and nothing
it seems that when she stumbles,
it’s me that actually,
“all fall down”
ah woman,
when you best me,
it brings forth the best
and adds an
“a”
in this poetic beast,
two play fighting cubs nipping
each other. the in us gaming
in this wordplay game,
so exciting,
her subtle reasoning teasing
results in a man as
a happy sore loser*
Oct 3, 2018
Oct 3, 2018 at 5:16 PM UTC
Yes I know it's your first language,
But don't let overconfidence get in,
And never let it bring you negatives.
Mar 11, 2015
Mar 11, 2015 at 12:58 AM UTC
and she is like a painting,
the colors of her soul infuse the dark world around her.
Flowers grow at the sound of her laugh,
for that's all the warmth they need.
Her smile radiates across the room,
a light that invites and guides those who are lost.
She lives, not with an overconfidence in herself,
but with an understanding that her beauty is up to interpretation.
She is able to admire the other paintings in the gallery,
but still knows she has something beautiful to offer.
She is just herself,
and she is like a painting.
Sep 16, 2021
Sep 16, 2021 at 2:09 PM UTC
Sometimes I think I’m crumbling from the inside out. I can feel a parasite knawing at the coffin encasing my soul and exposing the pretense of overconfidence for what it truly is- dust.
There was a time when a smile from a man on the street made me feel special. Now it tenses my muscles and knocks on the bedroom door of fight and flight. If it came down to it, I know that acceptance would win.
I once saw a TV special about how coffins are becoming larger and larger because of obesity. When I was eleven, my brain was overweight with the awareness of the novel I would write and the ballet company I would star in. Lately, the obesity of my dreams is directly related to the size of the graveyard residing in my brain like an icy sea frozen mid-breath.
My best friend hurts herself because she doesn't think she’s pretty. I renounced my faith a long time ago, but I always pray that she won’t be among the one in four women who are ***** because a man told them they were pretty.
The leering, drunken man outside the movie theater built my coffin. The disease of his hand stroking my shoulder put out the fire in my brain like malaria kills 1.2 million people each year. Like the 1,871 American women who were sexually assaulted today. My skin still crawls where he touched me and my mind still recoils when I catch myself wondering if my oversized sweater and Converse sneakers were too provocative.
Apr 20, 2014
Apr 20, 2014 at 1:12 AM UTC
The sound of small plastic wheels
On the ridged metal lip of an escalator
Bookends each trip between home and birthplace.
The first two uptempo, eager
To race to the smell of marble and leather,
Perfectly cooked fish and pastries with blueberries
The next two, piano, as I cross back,
Result of exhaustion, arms full of clothes and sorting small bottles into bags.
But on exit
Not due to vents, air conditioning, or the sensory assault of shopping under halogens,
Home smells of rust.
Of dirt and smoke - burnt.
Home smells more damaged and ****** up than its neighbour
And it's apt position on the map
Behind our back
Peering over the shoulder of the small ursa, overbearing and controlling.
But it's not the smell of burning petrol and tissue in glass,
Nor riot shields and plastic armour,
And only slightly of over emphasis on Northern Irish poetry during exams.
It's the stench of friendships, bouquet of break-ups,
Awkwardness and overconfidence,
Fake tanning and too much tea.
And like bonfires and cigarette smoke,
Burnt wood and tobacco embers,
It's the one perfume I can't get out of my clothes.
Sep 15, 2011
Sep 15, 2011 at 9:25 PM UTC
i’ve been photoshopping old memories in attempts to bring back color to over-faded, twice-forgotten black-and-whites
tried dodge and burn but that’s too close to what happened
you dodged so i burned like a stack of photographs and albums in a house fire started by christmas lights
maybe if i crop myself out you’ll turn bright again
until your whole face washes out and i can feel like you’re a stranger again
replace all your blues with harsh reds and sharpen all of my blurred edges
for a while things felt like polaroids,
instant results
but then i realized that i was just wasting film by taking one photo per roll at a time
i was ruining prints of thirty five other potential moments
we were never digital
but we were only ever digitalized,
conversations only spent on snapchat and half-second smiles in hallways
i’ll layer all of our photographs
because we sure as hell never had layers then
your smile is the same in every single one of them, but my expression is always off and my eyes are never quite the same level of jaded
somewhere along the line i’ve realized that no photographic evidence was ever taken of our life
i’m just looking at bad sketches with too many filters
i don’t even remember the sound of your voice
i’m writing poetry about strangers again,
people who have never existed outside of my head
maybe that’s just a bad coping mechanism, pretending that you’re just pretend
but i’ve been struggling with hallucinations lately
because photographs and light and sound is so **** easy to bend into whatever shapes you want memories to take
i haven’t trusted myself for three years now and i’m not about to start
overconfidence leads to the edges of cliffs
and i’m all too familiar with the steep drop of the ravine
when did photographs of you become a foreign language to me?
when did i stop recognizing either of us? why can’t i look myself in the eye anymore?
photoshop steals the life from my laptop battery
and reminiscing on things that may or may not have actually happened steals energy from me
so i’ll try to see if we can forcefully power down this crooked old machine
unplug me
i don’t want these memories saved anymore
delete everything
delete everything
unplug me
delete me
delete me
Aug 9, 2016
Aug 9, 2016 at 12:51 AM UTC
We laugh at him,
My friends and I,
In our bubble of teenage invincibility
We laugh at him,
Skinny and ungainly,
In shirts one-half size too big and
Kakis that were probably $10 at Meijer's.
We laugh at him,
Hair carefully gelled and combed to cover the
Bald spot where too many nights of
Indecision and loss have rubbed it clean.
We laugh, his awkwardness fueling our
Shameful antics,
Shrinking him until he appears no more
Than an irritating fly with
Strangely sad eyes and
32 years of small-town memories not
Validated,
Never appreciated.
We laugh at his first-time fumbling and confusion,
Not knowing how to handle us,
In our smug overconfidence and
Judgement like one thousand pins,
How to reach beyond our stubbornness
To teach us something worthwhile,
Something beyond the plan.
He sits like an origami bird that was made
Without instructions,
Perched on the corners of old desks,
In storage rooms of old textbooks,
Wrinkled and refolded.
Yet his sad eyes and open vault of memories makes him
Stronger, stranger, than I, we, have ever seen in the
Four walls of our learning.
Favorite books and winged metaphors
Fly
Next to seeds of joy and a father's death,
Twenty-two pieces of musical
Coping
That we laugh at,
That we see as a pitiful attempt at rejoining life,
That we scorn
With our teenage invincibility.
It's alright.
We know the value of less than nothing-
Our judgment means nothing.
His too-big shirts
And lyrical memory will
Exist
To anchor a life
Far after we have left,
Lost,
Wandering.
Jun 7, 2014
Jun 7, 2014 at 12:45 PM UTC
A machine cannot fix itself.
It needs a mechanic,
a tech,
an expert-
an intellectual with the drive to learn,
an idiot with overconfidence and
a streak of luck.
To be rewired.
To be rearranged.
To be powered off.
To be plugged in.
To be refilled.
To be cleaned.
To be fixed.
A machine must be maintained
by someone else.
I am not a machine.
So why do I expect others
to heal me?
Sep 7, 2025
Sep 7, 2025 at 8:38 PM UTC
Nick warned me of my overconfidence as I said the words
"Pass me your panic, Matthieu, that's what I'm here for"
Apparently I was calling on too much from the Frenchman
More than Nick believed me capable of bearing
But his words were too late to spur any moment of deliberation
-not that consideration would ever cross my mind
In just a few sentences exchanged between us alone
I spotted a glimpse of something in Matthieu's eyes
Naturally, I pulled at the gleaming thread, the traces unravelling within my hands
But the shimmer I saw, was merely a reflection
What i held was cold, a lump of misery and surrender
This man had given in to a sadness so toxic it had nestled itself into his very core
And I took it
Telling him to relax for this night, i have your back
But, Nick was right in his warnings, this burden is the heaviest I've yet carried
Though, I can bear it, and I choose to wear it
This is my duty, Matthieu, and yours is another
You are meant for light, heart and joy
Keep walking to your destiny, the happy man.
Aug 14, 2013
Aug 14, 2013 at 3:58 PM UTC
Art is working within a frame. Knowing and exploring that frame, using contrast, drawing attention across the field.
It’s an extension of language. Which is metaphor. The default art of language is the frame we operate from within. The words we collect along the way, to place along the veritable canvas of open air.
You need the frame to create context, but it’s also limiting. And it’s only when we understand where our context collides with other broader or more pervasive contexts that we can reconstruct our frame. Transcend it, and paint a newer, more comprehensive picture within a newer, more robust, frame.
So how big should your canvas be. Smaller frames require concision. Bigger frames allow more expansive exploration.
One would think, by those descriptions alone that a larger canvas is better, but it also requires more discipline. We can easily lose ourselves in the expanse and be left with nothing but irreducible chaos. Jungle. Space. Ocean. Not because these expanses are truly irreducible, but because we haven’t developed enough to place any kind of conceptual frame around them. We can’t place them into a useful metaphorical context, besides pointing into the void and reveling in its mystery. Dreaming up monsters or messiahs that only reflect our fears and ignorance.
But this isn’t a canvas it’s a concept and it’s hopefully a clear description of why overconfidence in our understanding can lead us to creating a frame larger than we can effectively navigate. Painting ourselves into the void, swallowed by reflections of our own shortcomings.
It’s not pessimism.
Each person is a natural artist gifted with the capacity for communication and supreme adaptation. Very fortuitous developments compared to say; ******* ants out of a tunnel with an incredibly well adapted snout, or establishing mate worthy dominance by bludgeoning a competing male with large outcroppings of bone. Music, written word, spoken language these are the result of our creativity. Our propensity to shift the scope of our picture. Capture understanding from depth by reducing it.
Language only has the frames we construct within it. We must place the borders around our picture somewhere, and playing within each arbitrary space is what creativity is. The self limited but transcendental use of ones space or time.
Jan 17, 2020
Jan 17, 2020 at 8:01 PM UTC
Today, I am the antithesis of beauty.
I rot at the roots of my hair and I reek of falsified overconfidence.
Today, I have no right answers. I stumble over feelings, cling heavy on each word and fall face first in explanations no one needed.
Today, I walk like lumber. I am doubtful of my passions and my body and my stride.
Today, I am the antithesis of beauty, I deserve to be alone.
I think back so painfully on how light my body traveled, simple traipsing passes of sidewalk lines and inclines I simply mastered.
Today, I stare my own eyes down—
How dare you ever think you had a right to smile? I have to have a **** that everyone can see,
I am a desolate piece of half-self someone alone amongst the sea
Of perfect people and lovely lives.
I spew forth all full of frothing lies to make it seem as though I do not hate the face I gaze with.
Today, I am the antithesis of beauty
And I cannot escape my own painful accusations.
Oct 30, 2019
Oct 30, 2019 at 1:58 PM UTC
Savor the taste ...
Enter the gates of
Join the ranks of the .......
Pompous .......
Middle of the roaders .....
Deceived, in belief
They're only one lane away
from the fast lane........
Those
Who's.....
Overconfidence
Overrides intuition and intelligence.......
Magically makes them boss and authority
..tragically.....
Living so fast is like
Jane climbing the corporate latter
each rung shes traveling faster .......
Can't see what's shes passing...by.....
Biologically inside .....
Burning with desire she.....
Can't deny .............
She can't suppress.......
Or quench .....
A yearning for uncomplicated simple and pure love ........
........
Meanwhile ........
Primitive.......
And true ......
Lost link wipes the tears from his eyes conjures a smile
and a reassuring wave.. ...
Saying I'm proud of you....
Him love you unconditionaly...
Him wait here for her . ...
Tarzan love only ....
Jane.....stay right here by the highway
Tarzan ...Jane soul mate....
wait.....
Right here......
Beats by dre......turnt up all the way .......sipping half caff.
Double chia tee latte.......
Silver two door Mercedes-Benz at 147 .....
Gucci ,pradda......
Louis Vuitton,
With her Versace sunglasses...
On ........
Sheeeeeee doesn't see
Her one true love ........
Drives right by .......
Tarzan waves .......left in the dust ........
Can't see Jane's ......
Gone.......
The jungles silent tonight....
Mourning the love that should have been .......
.......
I don't want be any part of that.......
*** are we doin here
With only one life .......
?
Apr 22, 2023
Apr 22, 2023 at 4:09 PM UTC
Hubris (from ancient Greek ὕβρις) describes a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with arrogance.
~~~
on the subject of paper thin strings
i'm tied, we're tied, you're tired
of being tied up to posts made out of stainless, painless steel.
ironically trying to sing your problems to the ashtray,
unironically trying to run, run, run away...
this post weighs me down
spins me around a thousand million times
until we forget that we've been dancing by ourselves for quite a while,
because there's never been another princess like me
except she wears the same crown every other princess does,
and she still sits at the bottom of the stairs and cries every night;
no white unicorn, no black dove.
but to all the princesses that wear top hats or silken kitten ears
you too are paper thin and water thick.
our strings are all the same:
Zeus himself saw to them being made of underfed dreams,
un-photosynthetic flowers that grew out of expectations in some genie's head.
so, where's your conclusion?
we all suffer from hubris.
we all survived the tsunami just to die in the ship wreckage
and suffocate in the debris.
we're all weak, and meekly making our ways along
these stupid paper thin strings
attached to a post made out of
stainless, painless steel
Mar 4, 2018
Mar 4, 2018 at 4:19 AM UTC
Deservance is a concept
made by fools
whom are plagued
with jealousy
and
overconfidence.
Aug 15, 2019
Aug 15, 2019 at 10:01 PM UTC