Whenever I dig into the complete work of a poet I like, I always find that their later work totally sucks. A hipster as fuck opinion, I know, but that does not ipso facto make it false; really, it doesn’t. Poets, at least poets in the last three centuries, only have so much in them. By the end of their lives, it invariably gets “experimental,” which just means obscenely indulgent. Go read Allen Ginsberg’s “Hum Bomb!” if you doubt this claim even for a second.
During my misspent youth, all my aspiring literary friends and I used to constantly complain about the injustice of this. We’d write shitty poems and lament, “If I were already famous, this would be considered brilliant.” We really said that all the time with no self-awareness or irony. No wonder none of us “made it.” But I can now make this calculation: I have not “made it,” nor am I going to “make it.” Ergo, I can write whatever I fucking want and it’s fine. Better still, if I “make it” post-death, the way Franz Kafka did, everything I ever wrote will be considered genius. All the more reason to write whatever. Hell, what I should really do is write very little, so that after I die even my diaries and the like will be considered essential: that’s what happened to Flannery O’Connor, you know.
In that spirit, I wrote you a poem.
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole for so long that I can never get the taste out of my mouth. I want to eat it endlessly, forever and ever.
I wanna eat your asshole
I wanna eat your asshole
***
“Another Poem” is an excerpt from Richard Power’s new memoir, Letters from a Heartbroken Pervert. You can purchase the book from Terror House Press here.
Richard Power is the author of Letters from a Heartbroken Pervert, available from Terror House Press.
