John Grey

These Driven Ones

They wrote and they wrote
while ignoring the lives
they could have lived.
They ate to write. They made love to write.
They grabbed brief snatches of sleep
so they could write while awake.
What they didn’t write didn’t happen.
Who they didn’t write about
couldn’t exist.
But really all that happened was writing.
The only ones who existed were them.
They were snakes chasing some abstract tail
and every length of its body
was the stuff that poured out of them.

From birth to death,
they wrote about themselves writing.

{Poem by John Grey}