[Five Questions To A Poet #3]
Continuing our series of getting to know prominent Second Life poets, the following questions were asked of poet- musician RoseDrop Rust with his poem “The Pitch” as our featured poem for March 2022.
1) What, or who, first motivated you to write poetry?
I started playing music as a child. Songs had lyrics. I wrote a few original songs, but not much. I started writing themed show announcements for my live music shows in Second Life to avoid using boilerplate hype as promotion. After a while, people started calling them poetry and asking me to read regularly. After a while I started rhyming more and getting obsessive about them. I was doing a lot of shows so there were a lot of them. Now I live in that place where I am ready to write.
2) What was your first piece about?
As a teenager I wrote a protest song that began “Dream your classist dictators/of frozen society/Not thinking anything new/just behaving quietly
3) What, or who, is your primary muse today?
Conversation. I plagiarize conversations.
4) Who is your favorite poet and your favorite poem?
John Lennon – Budgie
5) When is a poem done?
When I have to post it. At that point the only changes will be minor.
THE PITCH
I knew this guy who was addicted to his failure.
Get this, he had an eye surgically removed so he could replace it with a video camera and transmitter
and then video blog himself singing to his failure,
taking it to dinner, and getting in drunken screaming arguments with it.
He continued to show up to work just to be close to it.
Like a stubborn toddler testing his parents’ patience,
he kept doing that thing he knew would make them say “no”,
again “no”, and “no”, and “no”, and “no”, and “no”, and still again, “no”
until some sudden corporate corporal punishment reinforced his pain.
Comrades picked up his discarded opportunities
and passed him in the parking lane
taking “cuts” in line in front of him over and over and over.
He threatened to perform ritual seppuku over every new email insult,
begged for summary execution,
and constantly revised the terms of his surrender for anyone who would listen.
He burned an effigy of his ambition and
then nail-gunned it to a cross on a cork board at his desk.
He wrote martyrdom romances like the stories of the saints
he used as a child for auto-erotic fantasies. .
He loved his failure so much .
he built a wind up doll of office supplies and a pencil sharpener
and took it to bed. .
He wrote long rambling love letters to it in a dead language.
He couldn’t make even one woman, one mother, one nun happy,
so he philandered with exotic failures .
thinking that one might bring him to a new level of passionate despair.
Then, sobbing his regrets, he slunk back,
professing reform that no one really wanted.
He took his failure to the seedy part of town,
falling prey to all manner of disturbing perversion,
seeking more and more spectacular heights of failure.
He stood naked, feet bleeding, in the massive city dump of his evidence,
shouting out his URL for friends to view his failure
starring in MPEGs on his webpage.
A group of righteous citizens got an injunction against him
in protest over his parading his failure around
when their’s were so much more achingly poignant.
He wrote an opera about his impotence, a ballet about his disabilities,
and a War and Peace about his tragic history.
He took all possibilities to court and .
argued for their hopelessness in front of cynical judges
who, by law, had to agree to award him a stalemate prison term.
From a cell of his own construction,
he carved his failure’s many initials in his
Now there’s reality TV
someone, like me, could believe.
© 2022. All Rights Reserved. RoseDrop Rust in Second Life)