Why I'm Not A Plagiarist

I like poems. I was thinking about this casually and apropos of nothing earlier today, and then it occurred to me that I had the perfect topic for a blog post, since a blog is the natural repository of one's most useless and irrelevant thoughts. However the phrase "I like poems" might in isolation acquire some depth, some meaning, which would be unfortunate. I needed some padding. A line of Whitman's I had internalized came to mind, about animals being "so placid and self-contained". This is true of poems as well, that's why I like poems, they don't argue with me. They enter gracefully from nowhere, stand around for a minute or two, and then retreat obligingly into that comfortably furnished noplace of theirs. Just like a blog post. So far, so good.

But I couldn't stop there, could I? The Whitman poem had provided one valuable insight, surely there were more? Perhaps Whitman could write my blog post for me. So cool, to have a guest blogger who was a famous poet. So original, to have one who was dead. So paradoxical, to have one who was immortal...

I found another line from the same poem that served. I fiddled with it a little bit, but not enough that I could pass it off as a line of my own. Now for the others... But there was nothing. The context was all wrong - the human animal sweats and whines and kneels, but it is absurd to conceive of a poem doing so. I couldn't incorporate the rest of the lines into my post without distorting them beyond recognition. I was at my wit's end (or rather, at Whitman's wit's end).

So, a failed plagiarist. That's original, perhaps? At any rate I had learned something. You can't just wake up one summer morning and resolve to plagiarize. It requires a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances, together with critical discrimination (to be able to tell when someone else's work is better than yours) and a natural-born talent for deceit on the part of the plagiarizer. I'm just too lazy; I'm going to limit myself to borrowing words from the dictionary.