Category Archives: poems & short jabs

Hammered into Obscurity

Years ago
when I wrote
Flying to
Cambodia someone
wrote Swimming to
Cambodia in the
same time frame
& it rocketed
straight onto the
New York Times
best-seller list.

 

Not too long
after that
I wrote
Tripping in
America &
simultaneously
some college
professor wrote
Blue Highways,
which became
an overnight
best seller.

 

Years later
I wrote a
drug book,
Children of
the Sun &
Earth,
& damned
if some
writer of
pot-boiler
crime novels
didn’t crank
out a
drug book
of his own
called Savages;
the New
York Times
declared it
a breakthru
in the genre.

 

This
run of
bad-news
syncronicity
is like a
punch in
the face
when you’re
80 & your
whole life
long you’ve
been writing
novels that
get hammered
into obscurity
by the
American
money machine.