The payment’s the prestige. A taste, we’re told,
as marvellously inedible as gold!
For yes, their favour—granted and extended -
can shoot you to the real from the pretended,
where 91% of almost none
anticipate your next enfeebled pun.
So, most like, you’d try. Wouldn’t you? You’d try.
You’d gather up the jewels of your supply
and, with some flippant comments, send them straight.
Receipt’s acknowledged, and you’re asked to wait.
Which, naturally, you do. Check now and then,
till ‘then’ inhabits ‘give-no-thought-again’.
But eight or nine months later—yes, that’s right! -
apologies for lateness catch your sight
with circumstantial tales of changing staff,
as well as that old line that draws the laugh:
‘these pieces don’t quite fit the magazine’
(now ponder what it is we really mean!).
You manacled your pieces for a year,
unwilling to address a lower tier
in case you’d miss your shard of demi-fame.
And that’s the template for it. That’s the game!
You wait to breach the door. Join the elite.
But it was never accessed from your street
unless your views are ‘right’ (for which read ‘left’!),
unless you’re somehow fashionably cleft
or represent the favoured voice or hue
shoved up the ladder, picked to lead the queue.
No, true, your pieces don’t fit what they’ve built:
those temples to their intellectual guilt.