grandma moses never had to be on TMZ in poetry

The later we succeed,
the later we collapse into
success-sheltered self-parody,
this is our artistic covenant.

We are better off without becoming
Robert DeNiro taking every role he’s offered.
We are better off not being Elvis
there will never be the choice for us
between stamps that are young and thin
or fat and old
it will be fat and old stamps
or goddamned nothing and
that is a transcendent joy.

No one will want to see our sex tapes
not even the people we had sex with.

We will stay closer to real experience
for longer anyway
decades longer than the wunderkind and
the ingenues the prodigies and flukes
we’ll talk about the experiences
of every day suffering and toil
for longer anyway
by the time our stories are exhausted
by the time we’re just yelling about
how that intern brought us cold soup
we’ll be so ancient we will be
forgiven as slightly senile
instead of ruined by wealth.
That’s a blessing.

We will have more to say
we’ll have longer to say it
so the crap jobs or the no jobs
in our twenties and our thirties
will be worth it
as much fun as being twenty-three
collecting awards and racing yachts
probably would’ve been
we’ll have perspective and
we’ll have a little more privacy.
Grandma Moses never had to be
ambushed by cameras on TMZ
or whatever the equivalent was
when she was alive, of course.
Some asshole paparazzo on a horse
or something like that.

By the time we start repeating ourselves
pale echoes of our best work so as to pay
agents and assistants and hangers-on or
start only writing on the minor struggles
associated with being somewhat famous
all that work will be left to our estates
released posthumously when people would
find it tacky to call us on our
fading self-absorption and
that’s more than most artists get.

The later we succeed,
the later we collapse into
success-sheltered self-parody,
this is our artistic covenant.