My Legacy

                     My Legacy

These bagatelles,

these little chingaderos,

these word sequences

that I break up into lines

reminiscent of lines of crystalline stimulants,

and put on pages,

both paper and digital,

and which some other people call poems –

they just sit there, y’know?

Every one of them is an effort

to tell the truth as best I can,

truth being a slippery and ever-shifting objective.

I post ’em for an audience of dozens on facebook,

and from time to time I get to perform a few,

although as I put this down

I’ve composed about 300 more than I’ve performed.

But I’m not, really, published.

          Okay, two of the 800 or so compositions I’ve cranked out since naught-eight appeared in an artsy Auckland poetry zine called Side Stream, but then its editor changed and that was that.

          I’ve always had remarkably thin skin, y’see, and my tolerance for rejection has shrunk to near zero, so I’ve become increasingly unwilling to risk the consequences of submitting anything if the response is at all in doubt. This, of course, is largely one of the products of my unfortunate choice of mother, who was inhumanly abusive, and older brother, who was joyfully bullying. For me, the worst is always likely, and guaranteed to feel humiliating. After all, I was raised to believe, deep down inside, that humiliation is natural, inevitable, and deserved – as well as agonising. If it hadn’t been obviously agonising those two wouldn’t have taken such pleasure from inflicting it.

         

You see, then,

that I’ve also therefore clearly chosen

my resulting lack

of self-confidence and self-esteem,

and, if I so chose,

I could change these aspects

of who I am completely,

and become a thick-skinned,

egotistical self-promoter.

Undoubtedly.

Of course it’s all my fault,

and if I were only to follow

the you-make-your-own-life advice

of those self-help-guru assholes

all my troubles would melt like bubbles

and within months I’d claw my way

to the top of some competitive pyramid.

My failure to do so is therefore

undoubtedly due to my own inexplicable,

bloody-minded choices.

Now, if this failure inspires you

to indulge yourself in some

self-congratulatory, I’m-all-right-Jack

finger-pointing and blame-flinging toward me,

feel free.

I don’t give a shit.

          So unlike JK Rowling, with her 12 rejections of the first Harry Potter book before striking gold, back when I wrote long prose pieces I backed off after one or maybe two rejections, even though I knew that they were at least as good as most of the books I was reading. My nervous system just couldn’t take it.

          After reading a short story I’d written and had given up on submitting, the woman with whom I was living at the time asked me why – if I wasn’t going to get out there and sell-sell-sell – did I bother to write all this shit? My only answer for her was horribly cliché, but it was what I said: ‘Why do fish swim?’ It’s just what I do.’

          You see, I have this mind.

          One problem with this is that since I lack social skills and courage and both crave positive reinforcement and wallow in it the rare times I receive it, reaching other members of my species through my writing has always been both central and elusive for me. I just don’t have it in me to do what’s necessary – to push myself on others. I don’t know if anybody is even going to read this, but I want people to. I want a legacy.

          Of course, neither the universe nor just the rest of my species gives a shit about what I want. My country provides me with a pension sufficient for my basic needs, so I don’t have to starve or stay sober or bludge off my daughters. Lacking something as airy-fairy as a legacy is irrelevant.

          I sometimes wonder if anybody is going to go through my shit after I die and, if so, if they’ll do anything with it other than delete and otherwise dispose of it appropriately. This is, obviously, irrelevant once I’m dead, like a solitaire hand after it’s been lost and reshuffled.

          Once, some time in the mid-naughties, I drove up to Auckland to look in on some kind of writers’ association or guild or something’s sip-and-nibble occasion and, putting on my best Performer front, I impressed an agent who asked me to send her something to see if she wanted to represent me, so in due time – she wanted hard copy – I sent her one of the three novels I’ve written. She said she’d do it.

          The first problem was that she was a novice, first-time agent. The second problem was that she more or less promptly had some sort of acute mental-health episode and I didn’t hear from her again for about a year or so.

          When I heard from her again I’d just finished writing a long autobiography-about-other-people called Name Dropping. She said she’d consider it if I’d pay her a reading-and-editing fee. Now, I’m no slouch as an editor, myself, but I went along with it. She had me re-do it after advising me to be less self-deprecating, then she sent it to one publisher, here in New Zealand even though it isn’t a New Zealand text. She sent me his reply, that it was well-written but he didn’t want to do a book about the music industry just then. It wasn’t about the music industry, although a few chapters talked about people I met in the Hollywood music biz in the late sixties. Anyway, also unlike JK Rowling, as far as I know she never sent it anywhere else. At least I never heard from her again. Maybe her mental-health problems recurred. I don’t know.

          So I switched over to writing verses to a largely unresponsive facebook audience. At least maybe some of these nominal friends at least saw some of them. I’ve also taken to performing some of them to smallish audiences, for the past few years doing this accompanied by a musician or three. The audiences all seem to enjoy these performances greatly, but of course I don’t have it in me to get out there and hustle up more performing opportunities.

Because I’m such hopelessly damaged goods,

too genetically robust to do the decent thing

and just die,

my reaching more people

or not

makes no difference, really –

of course, nothing does.

The long term is an illusion.

The legacy of nobody alive today

is likely to last as long as Mozart’s

has so far,

anyway.