When he'd waited
so long
that what he had postponed
was no longer possible,
he still maintained, in utmost emptiness,
his standby mode,
which, in his current final stage,
has brought him all the way to the whirls of Styx
as the cripple that he, himself,
once defined himself as, at the bottom of a bottle,
mouldered in his dried-up talent;
the excess of the wild talents
he left fallow
after some unbelievably beautiful juvenilia,
in a gross betrayal against himself,
his fellow men and his posterity;

a Botticelli who left the brush untouched,
a Strindberg who never lifted the pen,
a Karajan who refused to ascend the conductor's podium

a Bob Dylan who turned back on the way to New York City