Biggest idiots I’ve ever seen: or, why do we write?

So late at night

I don’t have to listen to the thumping and tumbling of my soul

Why do we we write?

Where was I born? I remember a front porch, and not

Much else. Always there were books around

A whole room of them, a den lined with books,

Most of them in German, seemingly,

Goethe Werke, Schiller Werke

Whatever the fuck that meant

So I tried to make my way
 

 

One day in the buriedness of deeply sucking at

An author I raptly chose

As my favourite of the moment or the day,

I had this thought: you can MAKE these.

Somebody makes them, somebody DOES them.

They don’t come out of nowhere, someone

Sits down and does them.

I began to write. In shaky block capitals at first,

Always in pencil like they told me to in school,

In case I made an error and had to take a pink pearl eraser

And rub it out, leaving disgusting grey crumbs like dead insects

And when I had finished the story

Which was probably about horses

I thought it was good

And I began to write out copies.

 

 

Does this mean I was published? If publishing

Means distributing written material

To a number of different readers, then yeah,

Just don’t count the numbers

As later on,

Having written novel manuscripts, poetry manuscripts, thousands of

Book reviews and gazillions of newspaper pieces,

I did not wish to count the numbers,

As I did have an income

From writing, a steady one,

Just very small,

So I hoped no one would count it up

And see that a paper boy would make more,

Or a counter person at McDonald’s.

 

Oh but you’re in the arts, someone would say,

So why do you even think about making money?

Why do you sully yourself, what’s wrong with you,

Don’t you think you’re lowering yourself by writing for newspapers?

Especially when they line birdcages the next day.

Or start fires, I mean in the fireplace. Good for that.

I didn’t want to tell them about Dickens and guys like that, I don’t want to

Look them up, lots of guys and maybe girls too, who plied their trade

Whatever way they could.

If it's out there at all,

it becomes Game,

Public property that prompts some people

(who always wanted to write but never

had the guts to even get started)

to send you Criticisms

which are For Your Own Good,

and aren't all writers 

interested in "feedback" from readers,

isn't it always a good thing

an educational thing

a thing that will doubtless hugely improve them

if they're "real" writers?

So then I'm a fake writer,

and you can have your fucking gratuitous, sneakily sadistic criticism back

open your mouth and I will return it to you

(or some other orifice, I don't care)

because you don't know what the hell you are

talking about

anyway.
 

But there are bigger problems than this 

I hope I don't live to see it

Grammar is slowly eroding, not the schoolmarm type, not parsing sentences, I mean the matrix below and beneath vocabularly

That helps the whole mess make sense.

 

I wonder how it will be in 100 years, if I came back,

Which I will not,

Even if I could,

Or 300 or 500, if the planet hasn’t blown up by then or is

Taken over by cockroaches, who could probably

Spell better

Than the lamebrain mutants on Twitter.

I wonder if I’d know what they were saying at all,

With the speed with which they were saying it,

The fractured syntax,

Verb never matching subject EVER,

With no one noticing or caring, not even really educated people

Or will there BE such a thing

As everyone spews Orwellian Duckspeak.

 

Maybe just bouncing brain waves off each other.

I would not mind dispensing with words, I mean for-bloody-ever,

Because I honestly wonder

What good they have done me

Except to light in myself

A feverish desire to be “read”

Which has never come about,

Not even in this-here blog

Which probably has an offputting title

That I sincerely thought might ignite some sales.

 

At the same time,

I am unable to wag my ass

Or kneel down

The way I suppose I am meant to

To “get ahead”, to play the game.

There is a randomness about it

So that squealing ambitious pretenders

Say, look, look, there’s 100 Shades of Swill or what-you-call-it

Look, SHE made it work by writing three atrocious books

Full of appalling sadism against women

And these were ebooks

Did you know that

She didn’t even have to send a stamped self-addressed envelope

Or print out 900 pages and parcel them up and mail them

Or put them all on floppy disks.

 

But this is the business part

I suppose I must keep it purely away

From the mad addiction that keeps me sitting in front of this machine

I know I would write anyway because I am an idiot

I am STILL involved with this abusive person, this sadist

Who throws me a crumb once in a while

And kicks me in the face the rest of the time
 

 

And who needs Fifty Shades of Grey

When you serve a Master

Who is so completely

And utterly

Sociopathic