ode to the ink that runs
why don't poets
kill each other
anymore?
it's been too long since the buggering to death of
percy bysshe shelly
by
henry wadsworth longfellow, and
even that was an accident.
i can only remember
bukowski
with that bottle opener in sixty-two -- it was a good reading,
the way he
bifurcated that beatnik's
sternum,
and the ribs swung open like hands
about to clap. and he just stood there, that nameless beatnik,
blood slapping the ground, and he took it.
he died with his mouth shut. no last
simile.
not even a growl for the ages. he was only bewildered.
that's why you always got fucked up, bukowski.
you were lonely for
someone good to kill.
you're dead,
bukowski,
and i'm yelling at your dead body.
this is what we call APOSTROPHE,
defined as the direct address of an absent
or imaginary person, or of a personified abstraction.
apostrophe is out of fashion these days.
i would riddle your grave with slugs, bukowski,
son of mogh, and fill the holes with pissed
vodka,
and dream that i drank you to death. i'd lie
to all comers how i slew you, rusty soup-can's edge
underlining your jawbone, red ink, yawning and scrawled.
red ink. you son of a bitch who never rewrote a word.
i'd lie that i drank out your arteries and took
your powers for mine.
disputes between poets don't get resolved anymore.
we publish them instead. we mewl wittily back
and forth in respectable publications.
what we need is some ONCE AND FOR ALL.
nobody tells me to capitalize the first-person singular
while he's busy clutching at exposed bowel tissue.
sabers in the moonlit quad, that's my motto.
i should've been a
pair of jagged jaws,
rending across the flanks of wildebeestes.
instead i'm sipping
havarti at the fondue fountain,
listening to us ruminate: on shortlists,
on conspicuous absences from shortlists,
on innovations in
reedless microtonal oboe jazz.
over water crackers we ruminate on
feng shui,
reflexology,
derrida, the tragic persecution of
falun gong.
we live in the moment. we are careful.
there in the moment we flabbily congratulate ourselves.
our poetics, our CRAFT, how very hard we try.
and we start not at unpredicted noises,
nor do we whirl when rivals take the stage.
you've been dead too long, bukowski:
we punctuate no readings with the breaking of
bottles on table lips. our fingers are weak
with the holding of
stemmed glasses.
we lack the strength to
draw at measured paces.
a poet's gun. it should be serious as lead.
a piece heavy to lift, but irresponsible, and black,
black as the
syphilis on
lucifer's cock.
and
arabesqued, perhaps, with the scrapings of a long nail
during bloodshot nights where the gun is pointed in
turn to the ceiling, the door, and the cat,
and the roof of the mouth, and the door,
and the ghosts in the hallway, dead-drunk,
barn-broad, bleary,
the bloated dreams that make
for easy aim.