“I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And listen to the ripples as they moan
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And sing me a song of my own”

These words were made popular by the Grateful Dead as part of Black Muddy River off of the Touch of Grey album.  When I was a senior in high school, I felt such a draw to the song, that I thought it would be okay to borrow a few lines from the song to include in a poem I was writing for English class.  I was having writer’s block, could not come up with the rest of the poem I was working on, so I worked these lyrics into the poem.  I figured no one would notice, especially my teacher.  For one, she was not a Dead Head, nor was the song really that popular.  After all, it was part of an assignment I needed to finish and turn in, and I would soon forget about it and move on.  I turned in the poem without giving much thought to the fact that I had “lifted” some lines from someone else’s work and claimed it as my own.

Fast forward a few months and it was getting close to graduation time.  Every year, the English department published a collection of writings from the students for that year, and lo and behold they chose a couple of poems I had written.  I was honored, I never thought of myself as a writer, but obviously someone liked what I had done and it was being included in the collection.  I did not really pay too much attention to which ones of my poems were being included, and wouldn’t you know that one of them was the one in which I borrowed those lyrics.

It was a week before graduation, the day before the collection was to be published.  I got a note that my English teacher wanted to see me.  Uh oh, I knew this could not be good.  Upon final proofing of the collection, someone noticed that those lines in my peom were not original.  I had been found out, and my English teacher was not pleased.  At first, she threatened to keep me from graduating, I had caused a very big wrinkle in the publishing of this collection.  After she calmed down, she had settled on what my punishment would be.  I had to pay to have the poem removed from the publication and for it to be reprinted.  On top of that, I had to unbind and rebind all of the publications.  I learned a very valuable lesson that day, it never pays to fake it and claim someone else’s work as your own, people will eventually see right through you.

The moral of this story is:  be yourself, be original.  When you fake it and claim someone else’s work as your own, you will eventually be found out and loose any crediability that you had.