Persona Ingrata By Patrick Henry

From years overshadowed by smart authors, I woke in horror to find Change gripped me bleak as Kafka's insect or Dr Jekyll's fiend. Once on the skids in Paris, fleas that clung round my body I flicked at Sarte's photo in a posh café. Lacking fame to incite book-club females itching for Penetrating words and the urge to shed underwear, Harshly it dawned, I'd become a Literary Persona: No-one really, but more than a drifting nameless loner. If you're not the author, the hero, the antagonist, the reader, Or the critic or the professor, then who the hell are yer? Having tried all the above with nothing but hard luck, I'm ideal to steer this shady Persona new tack, At the Writers Circle, deluded that this is their ego: The Freudian pure self, their raison d'etre. The sick world of books breeds head-cases who need alibis For their mad moments they can shut in dim libraries.

Mauberley and Prufrock, who sound a creepy solicitors' firm, Are the alter-egos of Pound and Eliot, the genii of the poem, Spouting out like the instant Aladdin rubbed his lamp. Make your own magic legend that will never slump. Creative-Writing buffs attempt to capture themselves, And people and places they meet through their lives. But the bored world wants only the monstrous that never can be: Hugo's Hunchback, Poe's Raven, Kafka's super-flea: All these Personae: Kipling's incredibly perfect Gunga Din, Betjeman's luscious, tantalizing Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Heart-breaking as a court queen at Wimbledon, Inhuman as King Kong, who yet drew a pitying tear. I roamed the world six times because I can't stand it here. They say pen my life story, but I left to escape one. Modern Letters are intrigued by becoming no-one. Since '1984', 'The Trial' , 'L'Etranger', the hero now is the Non-Person.

Copyright ©2006  Patrick Henry

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