I want to live
But I am not creative.
So I find myself on a crowded train
Going to my paper pushing job.
Poetry for a Communist, Romantic Slob
Is my life’s work, you could say.
I’m not creative. The only way
To be creative, if you’re not creative,
Is to be creative within this context;
To admit, at once, that everything’s the same.
Wordsworth’s verses, Mozart’s music, it’s all the same.
A dog, no matter how small, is a dog, and has that dog identity,
Just as Pericles is Pericles, forever the same.
The novels I picked up at random just now,
The new ones at the front of the store,
Characters putting out cigarettes, and feeling
Hot, or tired, and saying “What shall we do?”
Every novel sounds the same.
In the train, staring at people—
Forget smart, researched, writing—
Just look; you can see truth in faces;
You can see every prejudice is true;
You can see the truth of surfaces. Not from any unkind
Impulse—prejudice is only the tragic recognition
That everything’s the same! Take me and you.
All we said, and did, was cliché.
We shared our secret prejudices. We “broke up.”
I’m not creative. But I loved all the way!
A clichéd thing making a clichéd sound,
When I did my research, was all I found.