The decadent style
Of consensual reality,
Now only voices crying
They're alive!
The scythes would never dream
Of dying
As the all-too-human grasses fall
As if a leap.
The great ones pray on Big Joe Turner,
The nearest thing to God,
A fool who lost it all
In pool halls
To learn something of oblivion.
They call it wisdom, now,
And students learn his name
To think of them.
And everyone soon learns the names
And how to say them,
And how to appropriate the appropriate
Platitudes of the tribe
And who can best help one survive
For a compromise
And how to lavish praise
As you draw your knife.
Their verse concerns the smell of sawdust.
The sound of the word guitar,
Things that hardly matter when they
Aim for every throat
That stands in their way, these custodians
Of beauty.
To think I gave up on poetry
For them.
