A common question when listening to some particularly bad piece of music is, "What were they thinking?!". In many cases there are reasonable explanations - the lure of money, too many drugs, and the like - but sometimes it's just the result of a perfectly natural artistic slump. Then one wonders if the artist knew they were in a slump at the time, just because it seems so evident to us. I'm starting to appreciate that it's not so simple to be a judge of one's work. I can determine my outright insipid writing (none of which get published as a post, naturally), but sometimes it is hard to figure out if something is deep or trivial. I especially get worried about rhymes being too simplistic. (It doesn't help that I sometimes raise my eyebrows even at an Auden couplet - I invariably like them all, but wonder if I'm not being critical enough.) So it goes with this one, which you could probably accuse of being callow, but hey, it feels earnest enough. How it comes across to the world at large, though, I have no idea.

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The soft music of chance
That's what I hear
Every time our eyes meet;
Would that I know it some day
Because each time you look away
All I can hear is defeat.