Thursday 23 August 2012

A Poem, by the Mollusc:


The Death of Modesty

I wrote a short book:
It dealt with the human condition,
Meaning, and what is meant by meaning.

Nobody bought my short book.
It was deemed elitist navel gazing
For the intellectually under nourished.
So I shot myself.

I did not literally shoot myself.
I simply stopped writing,
Which as a writer is a kind of death.

When I explained this to my friends
They promptly made it clear that
They were, in fact, no longer my friends.
A sort of second death.

I took to spitting at my own reflection
And envying the terminally ill.
A shuffling recluse, I learnt
To accept the peculiarity of silence;
I had started to smell.

A smell not dissimilar to
Blocked drains and the sweating
Skin of bruised bananas.
There were undertones of smoked oak.

Personal hygiene seemed futile:
Showers, clean clothes and clean teeth
Struck me as loathsome banalities,
To pity and rise above.

Cluttered with the commonplace obligation
Of ‘seeming respectable’
We miss the adventure
Of organic chaos.

I drank heavily in the mornings
And would masturbate into old socks,
The cat had died and with it my
Capacity to feel.

I started to write again.

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