Success?

THIS ISN'T A POEM

 Success to me is nothing but a superficial concept which inevitably means nothing more than phoney ‘achievement’ (as it’s understood by western society). Success appears to be a label. A new car. A large house. 2.4 children. A welcome mat. A double garage. A holiday home in Spain. A ‘decent’, well paid job. A sharp suit. A busy lunchtime schedule.

 

This is all success is. Something to take to your school reunion and gloat about to boys and girls your own age. To make them realise how and why you’ve had a better life than them. To show off in front of your ex lover. To make her jealous and regret choosing to go to the prom with the ‘sporty kid’ who now slaves day and night at a lowly acclaimed gymnasium doing yoga workshops for ‘the mentally challenged.’

 

Success is like a haircut. You either settle for a short-back-and-sides and merge into the past like a grain of sand in the middle of the desert. Or you decide to be outlandish and have a style which bellows ‘look at me!’ standing out like a falcon in a flock of poisoned pigeons.

 

The truth of success has been lost. Success should be a long and utterly unique journey which you begin in naivety and end like an aged owl. It should leave you with a spark in your eye, not a shine on your teeth as you wink at girls half your own age. Success should be something you can take to your death bed, and keep you smiling until your eyelids fall like thieves down the stairway to heaven.

 

You should find success laying hand-in-hand with internal bliss, staying within your bloodstream for the rest of your days. Pumping the ‘primitive’ ecstasy, hope and love of individual achievement around your body forever.

 

Success isn’t the man with a heavy wallet and with his c**k nailed between the legs of a Ukrainian hooker who possesses the greatly desired operatic orgasm. Reached not through the sex itself, but through the reminder that if she gets ‘good enough’ at what she does, she will be able to afford an education for her three young children. This ecstasy is of lust and of selfish, indulgent pleasure, not of understanding and a connection to your own desirable existence.

 

What I’m trying to say is, the man next door with the fancy car and the wild, yet-loveless and highly expensive sex life is no more successful than the tramp upon the street corner, eating from dustbins and sleeping outside with the starlight;

 

For if the tramp is deeply, internally and truly happy with the life he has chosen to lead, with no reliance upon the gluttonous western lifestyle, and he is happy to drift through life with no material goods but the clothes upon his back,

 

And if the ‘successful’ businessman cry’s himself to sleep each night whilst watching freeview porn on a 52” plasma screen, and feels nothing but pain and regret when he catches his own reflection,

 

Then surely the man eating scraps and dressed in rags is a ‘success’ and the man in the suit working 9 till five each day, commuting from a picturesque suburban terrace eating caviar and drinking champagne is simply...‘lost’. Lost in his own successful failure.

Reviews

[Luther]

you put that nicely 'penguinchild'. i totally agree. thanks for the reviews. and yes, sadly, it does seem to be the way our world words.

[PenguinChild]

It's so very true in our world, success is all in the way you see it. A person growing up in a well to do home in a sheltered life might assume that success is getting a high paying career with a good salary, getting married and continuing the momentum of the fabricated American dream. Where as another might view success as reaching out to her anorexic daughter to immobilize her self esteem and start eating healthy again. It's all in our own definition of success and how we value it.

[Kate]

that's goood. makes sense too, truthful like.