Venit Vidit Vicit – The Greatest Hubris Strengthening Hyperbole by The Greatest Self-Assured Literary Legend?

v e n i t

And so, as I face the final curtain…

I wish for my hyperbolic musings on stonework etchings on a wall behind the Mona Lisa, under the toilets in the Duomo, or shadowing The Creation of Adam

For someone to herald me as a master of my craft long after I pass and my ashes are spread

In 45 years since the great one passed, I hope for a particular day in spring or autumn, or maybe even winter dedicated to me, my work

–

Too much?

Why is it too much to hope for such greatness? Why are we taught to think so little?

Van Gogh, a man of such renown that even non-art lovers reading this know

Felt much of his work was the failings of a madman, those heavy, sloppy brushstrokes (just saying that gives me the tingles)

If people had indulged him more, would it have changed his outlook and perspective?

So yes, hold up my work, tell me it�s great, remember it, memorialise my passing

Remember me when you’re creating your own, that turn of phrase, the trick of clever punctuation

Teach my ways, my practices, and the way in which I deftly infect traditional form and syntax

I am your master, your saviour, and your hero, the one you desire-

Whose words you hang on every single syllable

Why is it so wrong to want recognition, to court greatness, and to bask in it?

Remember… “I’ll be a genius, and the world will admire me. Perhaps I’ll be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius, I’m certain of it.”

v i d i t

Ponder over the many-layered meanings of my hyperbole and create streaming platform sensationalised dramas about my life

About my dalliances with addiction and poetry as I dive into the thick of the densest shitstorm of my creation

Binge it, binge my life in 45-minute episodic form, and debate fervently over the half-truths and outright lies the producers create to sell my story as the next great Succession to the throne

Make it a postmodernist Orwellian nightmare in which Cthulhu stalks me from high

Small screen, though? Really? Let’s wheel out Martin Scorsese from the Mausoleum he will be living in by the time my passing comes

Let him turn his master’s touch to create a three-hour, overblown, big-named approach to the biopic of my existence.

Please… please… please just let me get what I want, in the words of another great arsehole. A Boreanaz or Duchovny-led ego-stroking piece of delicious trash. Have you seen them lately? Old and gravely looking, though still two of the best 90’s Davids. Bones was good, and Californication redefined Mulder, but I yearn for the freak in the basement of the FBI.

Maybe include me in the Honours list so I can defiantly turn it down. Who needs a knighthood? The taxpayers or the naysayers? I want people to say they loved me through gritted teeth as much as they fawn over my subsequent dark periods as much as they have a distinct distaste for my very own cubism, my boundary-pushing backward novel or poem within a novel within a graphic eulogy for some unsane propagandist. Call me Judas when I plug my brain into the Matrix and go fully neuroelectric

Find the link from one piece (The One Piece is Real, said the man with a bloody good �tache) to the next like it’s a jigsaw waiting to be solved (it’s not…there’s no pattern – it’s all hyperbolic disjointed musings of an artist on too little sleep and way too much hubris, cranial and penial/penal/penile) Remember, remember Lennon’s the Walrus

Hold my picture above you as you lament my death on the toilet or in the bath

No slit wrists or tight noose trajectory in my sights

How does one acquire a legacy? Can it be bought with Bitcoin? Or hard graft in the dog-eat-dog world of the low-level combative online poetry community?

Maybe I should Twitter tweet x x-weet some provocative hyperbolic statements about the rich and feckless?

Is The Boss The Boss because he was The Boss or became The Boss?

Was the Starman formed in the dark of the night?

Did The King coronate himself?

Stand next to a Banksy with a Rule Britannia tee two sizes too small.

Type this sentence backward and Ctrl+A, Ctrl+V the bastard until it fills the screen like a clever? Jack Torrance. Poor Wendy, poor annoying, irritating, grating Wendy. Lick the blood spatter of my repetition

v i c i t

Laugh with me, love with me, love me, laugh at me, cry with me, love me, scream at me, cry, laugh, spit, vehement, do something, anything

So, please include me in your favourites, alongside the greats like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austen, sharing a pigeonhole with Doyle (Scottish), Doyle, Thomas, Frost, King, Stoker, Christie, Carrol, Lewis (Carl Lewis was an athlete, incidentally), Stevenson, Burns (Scottish), Welsh (Scottish), Tolkien, Dickenson (oh Dickenson dancing with Poe) and Dahl

I want to be your Orwellian nightmare. The incredible saviour and antithesis to the likes of Dan bloody boring as truck Brown, Anne definitely-a-wrong-un Rice, and E.L. James and her chamber of dirty leather-clad, whip-smart secrets

I want to feel your reverence as you feel my hyperbole Shining, coursing through your very spirit

Really… remember me as someone who cared…. who carelessly but carefully fashioned his literary incisions with the expertise of a madman with a BSc

Call me a pretentious prick, and I will be the genius you love to hate and hate to love. Revel in my self-awareness and irony as I eat buttered scones for tea in the wilds of British Columbia, where I will undoubtedly retire as a reclusive button-pushing purveyor of perverse aberration of literary norms and an accomplished and accredited, lauded over auteur

Is he really serious or joking? I’ll never say

I want a T-shirt bearing my most memorable mumblings, a towel stating my most pointed opinions, and… a couple of placemats and coasters with my ugly hairy mug on so you can always put your cup of fancy frappecrapo on my face. Veni cum certa ratione vincendi

Maybe a post-rock, post-punk, post-funk, post-backbeat soft-spoken word arbitrator of cold-hard mumblings could put this to music? Sardonic-as-dry as the Sahara on a bad bad day.

Think The Fall, think Crass, Think Wire

Immortalise me as a bobble-head by the side of your bed, keep me well fed with your secret and treacherous ambitions of grandeur, as you aim to be bolder, more significant than I, as you lay on your bed, imagining my critique of your well-intended poorly-conceived drivel that Stephanie Meyer would spit out for brunch

Go read my epitaph, penned by Shakespeare for my demise. Old Billy the Upstart Crow knew a thing or two about what I do: �Good friend for Jesus� sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.�

Author’s Notes: I wrote this stream-of-consciousness style without a prior plan. I’ve had a weird and busy week, and not all of it has been great. This just came from nowhere, but I really enjoyed writing it. So, ta-dah.�

• Image Acknowledgement: Photo by Nick Fewings https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-and-white-floral-ceiling-uJwJ8Ulh_zg
• AI Free Acknowledgement: This is my own work and has not been generated in whole or in part by AI