“It’s a rat fuck.” – Phillip Levine
The children must never grow old,
Lest the spurious rest with the dust.
They have lost all their taste for conquest
And are given to squeaks from the nest.
The prism dissolves into monochro-me-ism,
With rainbows the aura of God.
The poets were too little read,
They fell for the slicks of their brethren:
Their books in the towers, their words on the lips
Of the pure who pass through the vestibules.
How little they knew, in that manic time,
How unyielding the trauma of youth.
The curse passed to them, to make the broken world
Salve-adage-able. There were not enough words
To silence the blind wisdom
Of everything wrong, irremediable,
Except the unconditional, which worked out to be
One’s experience is authenticity!
The moth one chased age three,
The bender that one’s mother had
In all its unresolved glory,
The time one stops for tea – or coffee –
All roads lead to a deeper – sense of me,
What the great ones prescribed, they say,
In the dog-eared remainders of old dead
Anthologies beaded by mediocrities
Who don’ need a 4 am memo to know which way
To butter their bread.
But children’s wisdom correlates with money
Thrown down the drain;
They will survive this strange attempt on them
To enter-cage or en-train,
What of the stewards who look after them,
Who once had some words of their own?
They still echo in the gaming rooms
Like a bright mechanical tune
Parlayed for a place at the table
Where the blandest voices reign and sangwees
Are consumed. That’s all the inmates are able
To tolerate: no talk of feelings, the things that make you angry,
For victory comes to the one left standing
Who had wagered the fewest shards,
And even the slightest howl from outside
Will bring down the house’s cards.
All this is known – if nothing else of this dreary
Place called poetry today, which sends its rancid shoots
To every paper of record and alternative weekly
Trying to sell the frisson of its exclusion,
To peddle its irrelevance as if it wants to be put down
And not keep acquiring more wanna-bee’s
To hang on to the would-be coattails
Of an emperor’s threadbare clothes.
The poems, oh but what about the poems?
Soulless and toneless, they live on like ghosts
In an attic only visited by the brave or foolish enough
To know these gimcracks pose no threat,
No PhD theses will be harmed in their renderings
Of mytho-historic events,
Their seconding with decades-old slang
Of the latest mass mind control lies
As if the work was to disguise
Their own corr-opted perfume
Will barely register
Above the din of the doomed.
But here we are – what seems the final whimper,
Death throes gone on so long
The people have gone to eat a hamburger,
Pick flowers, bury their dead
And have not – will not – return.
That is the way they had planned it;
The Poet, no threat,
Is one to the Republic
As his ancestors bore the mark of Cain
In seminar rooms and leading dissertations.
Don’t tell me you know my plight,
Who say you care, who hold the light,
For the sun shines on puppets and prophets
And the muses, like Elvis, have left
The pantheon, to cry among the pigeons
A river of tears, for all we should’ve felt, but didn’t.
