I lived for so long in that edifice,
that house of decline, where all my dreams
of rock stardom, never really mine,
existed like radioactive ghosts,
hyperexcitable and glamorous.
Electric guitars, I thought, would redeem
the dying I endured behind machines.
But that redemption never came to pass.
Instead, hysteria. The rock idols
fell foul of their dead counterparts, the ghouls
from that film where failures walk the earth,
and there was disembowelment and betrayal
in the psychic house of the incredible.
My labor was no more than it was worth.
John Foy’s first collection of poems, Techne’s
Clearinghouse, is forthcoming from Zoo Press.
