A Successful Art Career

Was the time you built

A tower from sticks

You found on the beach

Eight years old

A tyke in the sun

The indestructible things

Of the earth-mind

Found there

A successful art career

Is you wrote a song

In your bedroom

That nobody heard

Except the mice in the walls

Or that you wrote

Walking down the street

And later forgot

And later remembered

When you heard that

Pause and tone interval

Rise out of Monk’s piano

Like a magician’s white dove

A successful art career

Is being unable to focus

On your dumb money job

Because something about

That late Beethoven string quartet

From the old vinyl box set

With the blue cover

Grabbed you and did not

Release you

A successful art career

Was three sugar packets

Dumped into coffee

Some of it scattered

Across the formica table top

Between you at

Brady Street Pharmacy

Where it was always the 1970s

A successful art career

Is to live

To not die

In the face of it all

Against all that was built 

To stop you