MY ARTICULATE ENEMIES ARE LEGION;
which is to say
I flatter myself poets might read this just to hate it.
You can’t just add a bunch of line breaks and call a thing a poem
(I imagine them saying).
Sorry. I hijacked your medium for its agility.
Though it isn’t just line breaks, is it? It’s—here we move
laterally like the mind, lightly:
a sort of idea teleportation
now, on a date; now, just as the string has been pulled
through the metaphor that in seconds will fall over.
Feel its axis buzzing against the table.
In this world we can’t dwell anywhere
for long.
So I take it back. I’m not sorry.
You hate where the line breaks are, my disregard
for meter; I say, ha!
Each day people dump words into sentences and call it prose.
Slobber chase scenes onto screens and call them films.
What makes poetry the medium we resist
profaning? No, it’s disposable, too.
Or else forgotten.
The writer is always the minstrel.
The fool entrusted with truth is also expected
to entertain. And as for Beauty, she’s not the snob we wish she was—
she loves
giving autographs.
