inner scumbag

He's a lowlife within
it's the base gross nature
he operates from so swimmingly
to so winningly win and behave like
a champ - unfairly his best in everything.

The distance between

his glaring bright aim
and the upwelling spring of
foul, cruel deed left indeed undone
- another bloody corpse of potential self,
of horrible imagination, not the only one
on the cutting room floor - the distance between

these two points, one sunk in shameless subbasement
dank, musk and funk, the other hung strung
to celestial vault - the distance

is what draws the line so taut,
so straightforwardly clean,
so blamelessly bright, so
pure, so faultlessly crossed
in lines between stars
you could read by the light,
but the book would be shockingly
amateur smut, grotesquely
and vividly lurid galore,
or juvenile cheapjack
horror and fright,
mixed in with his guilty
pleasures: a weakness
for world class literature.