New Ars Poetica

This poem won’t sing on the sidewalk for dollar bills

or take penicillin; it’s disabled its airbags

and gone off the grid,

it’s allowing its id to have a say. This poem is not

your cure, sop, balm, or oasis of calm

in the world’s shitstorm.

It does not lament then-times, proclaim end-times,

or seek a new vision; it sometimes

wears a lead apron to sleep in.

It likes lubrication, fission, fusion, any impossible

mission, and occasionally

it likes to play dead.

This poem is fed up with being told to strip

itself of all meaning, and with rebuke

for use of the first-person pronoun;

it’s slightly less pissed than I sound. More like

less resigned, more willing

to go all-for-broke.

It won’t cadge tips or a smoke, does not seek

redemption, absolution,

or praise; it might ask for a raise.

This poem rose from the palm-fused-to-palm vise

of a martyr’s burned hands

and sometimes, just sometimes

it would fucking like to rhyme. It declines, equally,

to don G-string, cock ring, or strap-on;

nor will it masturbate while you watch.

This poem took a forty-year nap, then woke

with a huge headache

and a small bird dead on its tongue.

For a time it turned tricks, beating its wings

to powder against every bright

lit-from-within pane,

but that was then, before 2016, dark year

of the ascension

of our Lord the Mad Clown;

and now this poem would rather be guillotined

than sing for you on cue—it’s not

your bitch, anymore, to slap around.