The Literary Life: A Poem

The future wants a story,
romantic preferably.

Dying young, promise snapped:
that will do admirably;

So, too, will suicide
(cryptic note, if possible),

or an overdose, a sad
reckoning in some squalid room.

At the least, there needs to be
serious damage of the heart.

What the future struggles with
is the life invisible,

eked out solely on the page:
every day, two hundred words

or twenty lines, without fail –
the lesson of the master.

Not that a tragic childhood
ensures immortality

any more than Byronic
scandal, but fuck-ups do help.

What no one wants to read is
how love and fame came smoothly,

how he, she, they lived happily
and passed away, fêted, adored.

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