Monday 13 May 2013

The Things I leave Behind Part 3


You said too much
Or I said too much
For there to ever be silence
Between us.

You passed
The sign for friendship
When you were speeding
On your way to sleeping
With someone famous.

You are too much
Concerned with posterity
To ever get a grip on
Reality.

Experience for writing
Another poem should
Have been the last thing
On your mind, not the first.
Or do poets like you
Negate human responsibility?

When you tell me
How bad a poet everyone else is
Do you not see yourself at all?

You wore converse trainers
Because the young people
Would appreciate that.
They did. An old poet
Wearing inappropriate footwear.

Your appetite for alcohol
Is only matched by your appetite
For slander and reflux.

When I said, Who are you?
The right response was to tell me,
Not outrage at my lack of intelligence
As to the enormity of your fame.

Killing yourself in a poem
And then in real time
Stopped all the clocks.

Your good opinion of yourself
Clashes somewhat with the world view
But I don’t expect that will prevent
You writing your own epitaph.

It profits a man nothing to sell his soul
For the whole world,
I paraphrased,
But for poetry?

Do the poets who dare to recognise themselves prosper?
Do I recognise myself in every other poet?
The fragments of self I leave behind,
The minutiae of looking,
Examining my own interior
By noting the exterior of others.
The things I leave behind
The things I take from all of this.

The expiry date of memory
Is different from its sell by date.

And then, is now
And now becomes then.

I never forget, only unpack new words
In a cluttered library, in the remaindered
Days of my remaining friends.

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