 |
Poem taken from:
Free Sex Chocolate - Poems and Songs by Julian Gough
Poem of the Week
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Closed Loop by Gough, Julian
I
You can only astonish them once.
Afterwards, to your surprise
You find that you are still alive
Bringing better and better work
To a smaller and smaller audience.
II
You enter the valley of the post-structuralists
Everywhere their guns, magnificent
Point straight down, or straight up
Innovative, revolutionary, and useless.
III
The poems you wrote were spare and unpeopled.
Nobody cared.
You weren’t writing for them.
You weren’t writing for you.
The process continued. Usually at night.
Semi-automatic, like gunfire
Or ivy climbing a dead tree.
IV
Inconvenient and absurd
Words which cannot be sold
Continue to emerge
At night keeping you awake
Like stigmata, or flatulence
Selfless and selfish,
Speaking only of themselves.
Eventually you don’t even bother to turn on the light.
They pile up on top of each other
Like industrial products without an industry
Ghosts of something we don’t need.
Not even the thing itself.
Copyright Julian Gough 2010
