An Appeal to The Reader,

To the Reader,

Poem,
poem,
poem!
Poem!

Somebody said: make a poem, make it rhyme
I was like: "I can do that one time!"
then I lost interest.

I mean, it seemed a little bit juvenile, the way
the poem in question was progressing. Too sing-
song, too chant, too children's tv program host
sucka emcee, or

something.

I guess I got suddenly stuck-up.
Pretentious
I said:

try it this way! "Free"

unmetered,

and with the consequent heft of significance.

But who was I kidding? Not the reader!

The reader is inured to such tricks. The reader
has turned green from being jaded, has seen
free verse poems vomited forth like so many
rushing rapids, falling and crashing like so many
niagras, plummeting floods of unstructured words
into so many metaphorical buckets, and

Well,

once the process of composition is complete,
once the urge
to create poetry has been purged
in the act of its creation - does anyone imagine
the reader who really wants to revisit the product
of that process?

What is the thing that would draw them there?
Is there beauty there? - meaning, there? Or just
so much revolt against a norm?

a "norm"
that's fallen so far off the norm,
you barely even
see it anymore.

A norm that in itself
is so laughably remote, so obsolete
- so beaten and weak,
and bled - is there any envelope there
left to push at this point? Poetry.

All I see
is rips of paper, striped in places
with old, dried licks
of glue.

Nothing there that needs to be confronted, or opposed
at this late date,
surely?

Poetry
is for suckers.
You people reading this?
Suckers! The form doesn't exist.
It's been refined by being defiled, defined
right out of the dictionary. And we poets,

Well,

we can't really say
how we feel about poetry anymore, can we?
We don't
want to step on each other's toes
do we? And be called out! Forced to justify
our own - that's the last thing we want!
To say what's what, to have to make a case for Great,
in a world where Who Can Even Say What's "good"?
is the definitive mantra of the age; the challenge,
the dogma, the battle cry of
artistic integrity. An art critical theory
of who are you to criticize? The cat got your tongue? My
tongue. Our tongue. Lapping at it, like

a bunch of pussies.

all of us