The Price of Art - Commercial Success Kills Another Artist

The Price of Art / Commercial Success Kills Another Artist

 

1/

I got the movie

“The Basketball Diaries”

I bought it from K-Mart

 

I wonder if the shareholders know

 

while they’re sitting there

in middle class splendour,

counting their dividends,

and cursing their tax man,

I’m watching a crazed drug fiend

bash rebarbative

on his mother’s door,

looking for an angry fix.

 

2/

I stole some art

and deprived the artist of income,

but Nevermind the artist’s dead,

fashioned himself into

a martyr for an unknown generation,

though I do feel bad I deprived a

              major corporation of royalties.

 

3/

Commercial Success Kills Another Artist.

Starved from starving. Exploded.

Blinded after darkness.

 

Suffered a corporate soul extraction

with a stylus tipped syringe,

chemically reproduced

for the herd to devour.

 

Feral primal measure

replaced by a mission statement based pentameter.

 

Weighed down by grammys.

Sank in the flow of royalties.

 

4/

Ginsberg tore me,

Carroll restore me,

Charles Bukowski

is Henry Chinaski.

 

Kurt Cobain

died in vein

‘cause in his vein

was heroine.