Poetry: to the unbearable, the fake, the boring. Poetry, to teen angst, bad sex, gothic swooning.
Poetry to pus and pestilences and plagues! Of course! Let us only write poetry to express, for the thousandth time, the cliches of depression and annoyance, the cliches of orgasms, the repeated actions of six billion humans. Do we call it universal? Of course! Because it is! It is so universal that only TV-fed taxpaying adults could marvel at how much they relate. Nobody else could be as bored or annoyed or see as little value in the spoiled world. Spoil it at will; not only with chemicals and toxicity and incessant soil erosion, but by killing it with annoyance, with laziness and inattention to the perfect glistering details that ooze from every crack, screaming and sticky. We will sleep, the poets say. We refuse to dream anymore; we are too busy feeling annoyed at the veins in autumn leaves and the web of slime a snail leaves on dark concrete and the potential for explosion in every night sky. It irritates us immensely, that children are amazed, that people are still falling madly in love with each other, that when an old man lies dying in his bed he can point a withered finger at glowing New York and say in his last words to his wife, "Isn't our city beautiful?" Poets. Yes. They are all quite annoyed. Butterflies make them yawn. "Time," they think to themselves, "to go watch Anal Antics #27 again." They sniff and swat at the whirling dust in the sunbeam. I suppose I will drift off into my sea; full of blue winged dinosaurs, buried treasure, space monsters. I have my own world built on the prescient. It involves escape, of course. It flees with me into the wet blue jungles where I went on safari in my first real love poems, it eggshells me when the focal point of perfect beauty in my universe is missing, for a whole day, like a new moon. I will not live in the real world of poets. I am no poet. I'll make ice cream, study physics, eat sandwiches. I'll feed fifteen fish and ten snails with papery red flakes, or I'll drink an enormous glass of water, or I'll move to another country, in my desperation. I seek a city with no poets, with nothing but glass flowers, cities of ice, translucent children, stars. A city and a countryside and a people who have never been touched by poetry, and so, have never had to have the birth of every moment yanked out from under them by spleen, or irritation that claimes to be the beauty of the mouth and of all our faceted languages. No. They have always been standing on it, like a flying carpet, like a Perelandric island that ripples with the warm, sweet-fished ocean. I will take my adoration and my copilot and run, to this city, and I will become a trash collector, who has never written at all. But in secret, at night, on cliffs, I will recite my own sorts of floating words in a whisper, with my own hands over my own ears, and no one else will ever hear them. They will be the last of all the secrets, and they will take up very little time when they are spoken at last, ear-close. _______________________________________________ Five7Five mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/five7five
