Poetry Prompt Day 13 | Failure

I Ain’t A Swimmer

I’m doing you all a favor

I ponder the fish in the koi pond If only I had my own magic wand then I might swim as well as them; instead of sinking straight to the bottom!

I marvel as platform divers launch into the air headfirst without seeming to care There’s no way in hell that would be me A belly flop is your sure bet guarantee!

Are marathon swimmers even human? I suspect they’re some form of alien I can barely swim a lap of the tub while they’re powering along like a sub!

Hey you, dead fish on your back Please tell me, what is it I lack Why for eff’s sake can’t I stay afloat without the help of a life-saving boat?!

I accept that I ain’t a swimmer It doesn’t make my life any dimmer In fact, I’m doing you all a grand favor By sparing you the sight of me in my bathers!

© Carolyn Hastings 2021

Well if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?! 😆

I am, quite honestly and unabashedly, the worst swimmer. Ever. Period. A complete failure. Hopeless. Thank God I wasn’t on the Titanic!! 😅

Childhood swimming lessons scarred me for life. Mondays. After school. The anxiety-driven headaches and nausea. The stringent sting of chlorine up my nose. In my mouth. In my eyes. On my skin. I still have flashbacks.

It was lucky for my swimming teacher — and me, too, for that matter! — that I didn’t drown. I can still see him standing there poolside barking out his instructions. His name’s forever imprinted on my brain. An ugly keloid scar. Desmond.

I don’t have a healthy respect for Desmond, the arrogant prick, but I do have a healthy respect for water. In it, I have a good chance of being dead. Without it, I would most certainly be dead. I choose not to be dead, so I limit myself to ingesting filtered, freshwater by measured mouthfuls. From a glass. Or a bottle. Believe me, it’s safer that way!

I accept that swimming and me were never meant to be. If it means I can be alive to explore opportunities for success and happiness without getting myself wet, then I don’t mind for one second calling myself a loser. And it sure saves a lot of money on swimsuits (aka bathers)! 😄

Thank you to Sahil Patel for asking us to ‘write about a failure that made you realize that you can be a loser’. 🙏 ✨

This is Day 13 of Sahil’s poetry challenge. I started out writing a limerick but it wouldn’t work — there we go, another failure! — so what I’ve ended up with is a combo of rhyming verse and prose poetry.

Limericks are not my forte but I can do them when the muse and I are in the mood. I wrote some recently for Michael Burg, MD (AKA Medium Michael Burg)’s make-love-not-war limerick challenge. You can see for yourself here –

If you want to learn more about Sahil Patel’s poetry challenge and/or this prompt, then you’ll find everything you need right here -

Many thanks to Denise Larkin for accepting this piece into her wonderful publication, The Lark. 🙏 💕

Thank you to each one of you for reading. 🙏 💕 ✨