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A Final Manifesto

A successful poet
can indulge in a normal lifestyle:
food not wrapped in paper,
garbage removed, twice a week
breakfast cereal from boxes, rather than bags
and enough cutlery to feed the next-door neighbors.

A failure is denied luxuries
Not because he's poor:
			(since he must work another
			job, he is probably richer than the
			great poet)
but because without the fast food
and resulting indigestion,
without the reek of garbage and social isolation,
he has nothing to remind him that he's a poet at all.

I know I'm a failure.
I know it not by the rejection slips
but by the cobwebs on the ceiling and the cat shit on the floor.

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