Acclaimed Writers

Are never the same, their words never as rich, stories never as new as those

Before the glory.

Cowering in front of an angry mob which peels letters off the page and sticks them on lampposts

Dumps them down mail chutes, hangs them from the street lights, the weakened writer

Eventually will acquiesce, putting his word processor on auto-pilot and

Faintly, faintly remembering every now and then the furry ball of wire inside him which once

Graphed her way up to his organs and embraced them tightly until he

Howled out into the empty night the first lines of a book, the title of a poem, the setting of a play

Imputed now for the words which gained him fame, she

Just whimpers “What happened?”

Keep it to yourself he tells her

Like she’s some man on the train, who “asleep” lets his hand tumble about

Maybe, maybe you are the writer

Not because you are exceptionally acquainted with prose and poetry

Or because you are renowned at any level, but because you have gotten into the habit of being

Particularly poltroonish,

Quietly abandoning your wire, whispering to her fuck off, but she reads you, she reads the

Rhythm of the blood pumping through your veins and she knows you are lying so

She struggles her way up to give one final squeeze hoping to get it out of you; she embraces

Tightly, thinking of the fear invoked by the art she helped you put out into the world, trying to

Understand where you’ve been, why words originate in your throat and no longer your chest the

Vibrations no longer there to shake her back into shape after a night’s long embrace,

Why you would leave her, painfully coiled in a shape sized to your heart, to go claim

Xeroxed passages as your own.

Yield, she begs, but you’ve become a

Zealot for the approval of your readers