washington post/poetry’s dead
says poetry is dead but stumbles arms-out grasping from the grave while twitterliterate frankensteins lure lightning to their own stitched prose and perhaps it’s poetry, and perhaps it’s the swamp-bog thing that came from a blog, vaguely radioactive, somebody’s goldfish that got flushed down the drain and adapted and evolved; says poetry is dead but perhaps only in washington, and it’s strange to say that poetry is dead when paint is dead and cars aren’t exactly living and a movie’s only moving if you actually pay attention; implies the programs/grants/journals and societies of oetry with a capital P are deadening, like only ever eating fastfood or country club dinners, always the same yawning gawping decor of turkey-stuffed faces trying to succeed at swallowing their own tail/like their own self-regard, while a manic sonneteer commits seppuku (or hari-kiri, depending on if this is chapbook or open mic) with a butterknife and somebody’s drunk uncle who lobbies for newspapers (can we just get a subsidy like farmers to keep our pages fallow?) shouts “fore!” and then giggles and asks for another penile colada (slurring a joke which he got from Grisham’s The Firm which was the last book he read because the novel is dead anyway), and the sonneteer’s body is wrapped-up in the table linen and carried away; and outrage in the comment section and the occasional poem which of course nobody bothers to read, because we are all too busy swallowing our own tale; and of course we are all stumbling towards poetry half dead all of the time, look at your own mother’s facebook page, look at your own self texting, because of course it’s a poem just not a very good one, except when the lightning strikes and Ben Franklin’s high as a kite/ that’s been made from recycled newspaper and pop-sticks and horses’ hooves and Ginsberg’s best minds of his generation/ and he had a vision of T.S. Eliot peeling away in a Ford Thunderbird with the top down and his toupee scalped by the wind/Hieronymo!
