The End

[Leanne]

I have no poems left to write.  The end
has not come with a bang; it's rather sad
that Eliot was right.  He's been no friend
to poets of today -- the fame he had
has left us feeling broken and undone,
a foetus in a womb long dead and rotten,
or candle flames beside a blazing sun,
a dull, insipid light too soon forgotten.
It's here, if I were true to form, I'd write
some vulgar, flippant line to shift the tone,
or whine that other poetry is trite
and never half as clever as my own.
But as I said, the poetry is gone
and only foetid echoes linger on.

[Achebe]

Eliot stands out, because he lived and died
in an undiscerning age, less so than Will's,
which words and entire lexicons midwived,
yet still a time when shop work paid the bills
through nine to fives, and Sundays robbed of sport.
A closed club of the empire's men, who'd write
some flashy long legged nymph or two to court,
their readership assured. Unequal fight
between that age and this, when every hack
can fire into the internet his verse,
and catch the modern masters in his flak.
So heap abuse on that bad boffin, curse
Tim Berners Lee, whose hyperlinks have doomed
poets in the internet entombed.