The Poet's End
Blow-Daddy is hollering like the horn section of some dysfunctional jazz orchestra. He’s saying there’s nothing new to say and that I’m just another masturbator in the donor jar of a moribund research centre where nothing of any use will ever be found. He’s just one of many detractors.
I listen out, past him, into the spring rain which is falling soft as slippers, onto the asphalt (I like that word, it’s a thousand mile journey away from the tar that MacAdam so Britishly levelled the roads with). In the rain, I hear the voice of God, and she says to me, there is no end to wisdom and no end to the new, just as there cam be found no beginning to the old. Blow-Daddy would put out his eyes, if he could, and dismiss my God as just another rude hallucination. In my techno-rainbow world, he’s certifiably insane, but here, on the grey plane, he’s a bastion of the pragmatic. He laughs at my aspirations, says I will be no more a renaissance man than Jim Morrison. But he doesn’t dig my meaning: doesn’t know that I’m not interested in virtuosity, just in being re-born.
The rain on the asphalt reminds me of all journeys I have made. So many now. I’ve worn out my soul on those roads.
There’s a certain poetry in that, but it’s not the truth. On those journeys I rubbed myself raw: down to the hard, wired edge of me. It’s here, in this sleeping city, that I’ve worn myself out with the applause of pundits who sanctify the sacrifices I made for my art. They do not know the horror of the things they say. I sacrificed nothing for nothing.
But I’ve been a fool for their marshmallow words
And now I yearn to be reborn
To find myself
Looking down 500 feet to the raging sea
And bracing myself to jump.
I’ve climbed too high. Been sent to a dream of sleep by the thin strata of dizzy heights. If I let myself drop. Then I will have made a sacrifice.
They know nothing of me, those fools: detractors and sycophants alike. They praise my follies and build a sarcophagus to smother me in... And I am smothered: burned out of my fire.
So, I tell Blow-daddy I’m to leave the city and the memorials where they’ve burned out my name in acid lights: I’m to turn again to the asphalt and the poverty that made me what I am; and that I’ll be reborn on the road when the clouds open up and soak my soul to the bone.
Talk is cheap, Blow-Daddy interrupts. But I cut him dead, pick up my bag, and leave without another word.
Page(s) 151-152
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