Posterity II

Critics find it so uncouth
To confess the visions of our golden youth

With our egotistical last breath
Instead of slyly after death,

When the worth of what one tells
Might accrue to someone else,

All the dirt and hidden facts
Of a poet’s second acts

Burglarized from every poem
By the hacks who didn’t know him:

Why should poets have control
Instead of those whose only role

Is to track down what might make
The artist’s work completely fake,

By replacing beloved faces
With completely unfamiliar places

So the unassuming scholar’s life
Becomes a fraud: a hidden wife,

A second family in Great Britain,
His collected works ghost-written,

By, it turns out, no one other
Than, dear reader, his biographer.

October 11th, 2021
Kaiholu