Ode to Failure

Many prophets have failed, their voices silent
ghost-shouts in basements nobody heard dusty laughter in family attics
nor glanced them on park benches weeping with relief under empty sky
Walt Whitman viva’d local losers -- courage to Fat Ladies in the Freak
Show!  nervous prisoners whose mustached lips dripped sweat on chow
lines --
Mayakkovsky cried, then die!  my verse, die like the workers’ rank & file
fusilladed in Petersburg!
Prospero burned his Power books & plummeted his magic wand to the
 bottom of dragon seas
Alexander the Great failed to find more worlds to conquer!
O Failure I chant you terrifying name, accept me your 54 years ole
Prophet
epicking Eternal Flop!  I join you Pantheon of mortal bards, & hasten
this ode with high blood pressure
rushing to the top of my skull as I=if I wouldn’t last another minute, like
the Dying Gaul!  to
You, Lord of blind Monet, deaf Beethoven, armless Venus de Milo,
headless Winged Victory!
I failed to sleep with every bearded rosy-cheeked boy I jacked off over
My tirades destroyed no Intellectual Unions of KGB & CIA in turtlenecks
& underpants, their woolen suits and tweeds
I never dissolved Plutonium or dismantled the nuclear Bomb before my
skull lost hair
I have not yet stopped the Armies of entire Mankind in their march toward
World War III
I never got Heaven, Nirvana, X, Whatchamacallit, I never left Earth,
I never learned to die.