The Masters Of Failure

I was groomed by amateurs for a career in failing convention,
where success was an image I was made to see-everywhere
-but never in those I was with. Nor in me.

True defeat took flight with me when I took
to grooming myself with the masters of failure.
After many years I learned that in the mastery
of those I followed, Kafka, Kierkagaard, Orwell
and Quentin Crisp, they had perfected their follies
through writing and they were perfecting me.
Without intent they became the definitive models
for celebrating the failure in life, for many more to follow.

They wrote the books
that became the perfect hooks
on which to hang the future of paradox,
failing whilst still alive enough to share it.

The people I followed all had resolve,
and in that they were ultimately not failures atall.
What I and millions more moderns found
was how when intensity and obscurity combined
in script worth sharing, it was the cause for later fame.
As we found truer selves we became links in a chain-
through how we changed, for reading how our masters
condensed all the life with how they saw themselves in their writing.