I produce avant-garde poetry for a post-Modern populace,
proffering pithy postulations about posteriors and
hypno porno, real port-in-a-storm stories, because
my society has “progressed” past tradition and inhibition,
past superstition, past basic fucking compassion,
into the barren, directionless plane of Post-Truth.
I hear, I write, it’s written: “batten down the hatches!”
while underdeck, we poor Plebeians sit and blither, penned in,
getting toes wet in the rising water. We shiver,
pontificating about this brave, new Pontiff,
not so much anointed in oil as tarred-and-feathered by bitumen and Benjamins,
rubbing his asshole like an erect nipple so we wouldn’t remark at his naked, nuclear-orange body.
The Emperor, denuded; the Clergy, defrocked;
the 5th Estate, diluted; the Middle Class, defrauded;
the Climate, deranged; the Dream, deferred.
What manner of escape of yours is preferred?
Mine is rhyming calamities of the world.
I’m so blasé, I should be a crême brûlée! Ha!
The writer, he employs ellipses,
even complete syntactic collapse
in order to indicate to the reader that,
he too feels anxious about their telepathic response
to his well-woven words because he has heard people say that
when I am read aloud, it sounds so stunningly false, as if I were foisting upon
some haphazard wedding guest or reluctant passers-by a raving Mariner’s tale.
But, this is no Faustian Fuck-You, no fine-print confinement, this is merely how I learn from you.
By setting you to wonder, stepping back and watching the machinery metastasize,
sometimes I get a kick outta watching a belief system capsize.
You see, the sick reality is that ink dosed with the dope of William S. Burroughs
has burrowed and borrowed its way into my temple and I, bewitched,
must quote this insidious agent
for his words speak through me:
“You can find out more about someone by talking than by listening”
and I nodded off to the raspy, broken record of his shattered voice –
better when read aloud,
more magic in spoken Word,
thus spake Zarathustra,
and the first Word of Genesis, transcribed as it is past all recognition,
so say the pariahs and prophets who peddle at the pulpit for personal profit
against friends and family alike by whispering to those ancient, buried fears;
with forked tongue, taste the stone tablet tradition bitter as a potent potion.
Where has the vanguard of this post-modern age fucked off to?
Lost at sea, my eyes reeling with no coast to cling on to,
I rave until white foam covers my lips and the sky
when I suddenly cease, silenced by my impotence.