Rejection Slips


A Frustrated African Poet Curses His Publishers

 All you shit-faced publishers who thought I was finished
who tried to dampen my spirit and cripple my soul
with your lorry loads of rejection slips, watch out!
You are yet to hear the hammer of  my voice ,  as tender
as  thunder ,  against your dirty eardrums. I am
the hibernating bear with real fire in his belly and a bellow
as terrifying as  a tornado approaching you  in a car
with a broken windscreen along the expressway
somewhere in New Mexico near the Grand Canyon.  
I have been sleeping now for seven years.  But look!
The iceberg cracks, the levee breaks, the volcano erupts
and the angry lava spreads like hot mud towards the valley
of the mean villages you call  your  minds.  O ye
breathing corpses, ye scented cunts,  cadaverous entities,  
I am the actor cursing the snow in Ulysee’s Gaze.
I will scatter the ashes of your disdain like flakes
among the elements and these treacherous slopes of ice.
Wait for me, ye nycompoops, watch out for me,
monumental  arseholes, nonetities,  distinguished
vegetables, who sent me one thousand and one  rejection slips,
I am coming to get you, one by one, my laurels around
my neck, glistening in the setting sun of your conceit
like your fatty entrails rotting in formaldehyde in Damien Hirst’s
gangrenous masterpiece: “This little piggy went to market:
This little piggy stayed at home !” I saw you in that  exhibition,
didn’t I ? I saw you. Do not deny ! You were framed in  a glass tank
full of green water, surrounded by your juices’ slime
and a parliament of maggots! What was  the  title of that exhibition?
At the Tate Gallery ! Damn it! What was its title? In 1996!
 I remember it now: `Some went mad, some ran away.’
Remember ?  You encyclopaedic ignoramus. It  won the Turner Prize.