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.