I Eat Poetry

Leontia Flynn
Personality

'Poetry', you are saying, 'is nothing but personality...'
and I look out onto the row upon row of grey hills
and light striking the rooftops, and just at this moment
there isn't much in my life I'd miss if it were over:
the weird cheerful meanness of people to each other,
about pay, status, odd grudges, responsibility;
work's meaninglessness – but its opposite, leisure's abyss!
a snake coiled in the chest morning after morning…

How do I cope when poetry is part of this bullshit?
Part of this racket? What you call 'personality'
seems something heroic; it seems the rictus grin
on a student's practice corpse – that breathes iambically
between each line, with their knives parting the skin,
'love me, love me, love me, love me, love me…'

(From: Leontia Flynn, Drives, London: Cape Poetry, 2008.)n