Dead Poet

Romanticise my poverty

Make me your project

Your Virtue Flag

Your Drum

Bang me

Loud

For the crowd

Or in your own echo chamber

Your private show

Shh

Smug smiling inwards

“Only we know...”

Romanticise my many lives

And dream my streetlife

A gangster's paradise

A cardboard kingdom

Heaven's Gate

And validate

My disenfranchised state

As freedom

Choice

And in that tainted light

Lend me your stage

To raise, for once, my Voice

I could step away

Refuse to play

This game

Shrug off the pretty mask

That hides my shame

Crack the glass

And let the dull reality

Of my grey, mundane

Filthy, immoral, non-PC

Base, desperate, snarling

Two fingers up salute

Up in your face

And two in your back pocket

Fishing for your wallet

Reality

Would you walk away?

You may.

So

Romanticise my poverty

Dream me a bohemian backdrop

For my starving frame

Paint my squalid squat

In beatnik vogue

And please, please, please

Do not refrain

From telling them,

When this world's done with me

My last breath was not despair

Or pain

No

It was poetry...