Fame

Whence comes one then many and on her back

A perpetual groundling, butted to the bed

For any and all who pay for the sack

While the mindless spenders need never be led.

For they seek the cheap sheets with just the flirt

Of procurement caring not a tiny wit

When she and they go dancing in the dirt,

They too get muddied but are ignorant of it.

O! Poet! Your “wayward girl” is all grown up now!

Heeled high and netted with the stink of fish,

She whispers from a wily wax red mouth how

For just a cheapened sensation, all that is wished

Of her can be granted but granted that all must

Be got cheap. What once was casual coyness

Is now the deliberate target of excessive lust

By those who have dressed her for nothing less.

As a young girl she led old, blind poets by

The hand. She led them through every single

Arch of time as she whispered to the sky

While from the poet’s coat her eyes had mingled

With the light from the poets unseeing, seeing sight.

She knew the child-like need to rise above

And to believe, to know, that such ascension might

Always be the subaltern to laborious love.

But now the heights are conceived from below!

And now her labour is naught but a travail

Of bastards who fall from her in pedestrian rows;

An assembly of banal and useless wails!

But lets remember great Milton and the

Girl who listened in astonishing bliss

As a reminder that idolatry does not have to be

Stale heiresses whose names rhyme with his.