Why I Have Trouble Submitting My Work

Someone has a cool new poetry idea: put 1-4 lines of poetry on the inside of a matchbook (I'm assuming it's a blank one, custom designed to highlight poetry, not just pasting poetry lines into existing matchbooks. I want to send them some options.

My first misstep was to spend time obsessing about what the editor meant when she wrote :Grab a matchbook. Flip it over. Now imagine your poetry there on the cover."
Does she mean flip it OPEN? I spent far too much time thinking about this.

Next, I began looking at poems to find lines to send and discovered that nearly every line of my poetry has more than 25 characters in it. Each line submitted must have 25 or fewer characters. It must also "explore language, live outside the mundane, evoke color and sound, convey mood."
None of my work does any of this, I respond from a cowering posture, recover, copy out lines, and type them up.

I find five matchbooks in the house and paste the five bits I've chosen inside the covers, so they can be seen when the matchbooks are flipped open. I flip them open and imagine whether or not they "spark poetry in unconventional circles" as the editor hopes seven submissions will.

I'm pretty sparked by:

The formidable now
shrivels jokes.

from "Perils"
***
Her pencil sharpened
her wits

from "Self Portrait #2" is okay.

***

Steakhouse truth:
some are hungry.

from "Feeding Tube Blues" is best when it has from "Feeding Tube Blues" below it. I don't know if it has a high enough smoldering point standing alone.

***

your ski rhythm tightened
through your ankle --

from "A Tentative Mathematics of Atonement" is sensorally interesting whether or not sensorally is an actual adverb anyone else will recognize.

***

my fingers fast in gloves
brazen among dog turd
and blackberry

from "Fighting Entropy, September" may just be gross. Maybe I should go with the last two lines, leave the gloves out of this?

And here is where it goes to hell and I second guess myself to the point where I say "what the hell?" and shove the undeserving into an envelope and out into the world because my brain shuts down, refusing to choose, to judge, to look critically but without meanness at my writing and make intellingent decisions. This is an area of difficulty for me, probably my next largest area of difficulty after procrastination. My critical ear, choice-making brain, poet's sensibility, they all say, we're out of town, we've left no forwarding address, don't call us, we can't be reached and so my disbelieving self-sabotaging idiot self is left to submit the work. She has absolutely no sense, being one of the monkeys not allowed to sit on one of the hundred stools in front of the hundred keyboards whose job it is to type randomly proving that written beauty can be produced ala typing time. My monkey picks her nose and dips her tail in the toilet. And she's the one I call on to send my work out.