The Interview

The poet is sixteen

he carries a rucksack swollen

with anxious dreams one notebook

in which he jots candid

nonsense he does not watch TV

or mingle with the guys he

reads Keats Coleridge he listens

only to Classical music he

ponders calculates what

he will tell them

when they come to

interview him

 

The poet is twenty-one

he does not listen to the wiser

professors at uni he sleeps

with girls who study Law

drinks with the boys who

study Finance Chemistry writes

about all the deep existential stuff

writes essays about Ginsberg Dante

thinks confidently when they ask him

he'll aver that to be a great poet

you have to look into the

bleak core of things you know be raw

 

The poet is twenty-four

his father has leukaemia he

drops his job teaching

bored suburban high-school kids

he must go home when he

comes back his job's gone

like an Avril Lavigne boyfriend

it's no one's fault he's just

a fatality of the crisis he's

not sure what he'll

tell them at that

interview he will

figure it out

 

The poet is twenty-six

he moves to London finds

a room owned by some Indian

codger who juggles five

properties and hates black people

£420 a month for a desk

and a lumpy mattress that

gives him a bad back

leaves him to fend alone

against the heater on the blink

the crisis is still no-one's

fault so he stocks Christmas

toys for minimum wage recites

Neruda to African Bulgarian

Lithuanian colleagues who tell him

you should go to X Factor

he chortles well there's some

interview

 

The poet is twenty-nine

all the girls he used to sleep with

are now lawyers his friends corporate

analysts he sees Facebook photos in

Costa Rica in sunglasses he no

longer listens to Classical music

only to Fytch and The Living Tombstone

he writes freelance about expensive

cars tablets football other things he'll

never have his girlfriend is

a doe-eyed Brazilian immigrant when

she undresses he sees the scars

running both sides of her forearms

the story behind them was and still

is unknown nobody ever

interviewed her about it

never mind him

 

The poet is thirty-two

they wait for him outside his

flat knock him face-down

kick his stomach inside out

hold a knife to his neck

he misses out one week at

the windowless office where

he spends 11 hours of his day and is

still in probation he can't speak

in that state can't be

interviewed can't even

swallow food

 

The poet is thirty-six

he no longer believes in the

compassion of Christians

the reason of atheists the bunkum

of mayors the mission of

feminists the pages of

professors but comes back

on his birthday to

find his twenty-year-old

flatmate who does cocaine

wipes floors at Nando's

left him a donut with a candle

he goes to his room they eat

together there's no space

for interviews only their

small commensal confessions

 

The poet is fortysomething I don't know

he made it big now he's behind that desk

the fat lady from Faber says something

it's such a great privilege to have here etc.

they're looking at him he must be so chic

such envy the first to stand up and ask

a question is a kid of nineteen

who's read all of Larkin and Duffy

has his own notebook of bullshit and

he asks him What should I do?

and the poet leans forward

and is a hundred or a thousand

years old now maybe more

and he tells

them

 

Study Law while you can

and don't believe a word

that you find in the books