All These Busy Busy Entrepreneurial Poets
All these busy, busy entrepreneurial poets
trying to substitute their usefulness for talent.
If you can't sing well enough to bear your own voice
to get lovers and applause on your own merits,
manage a band, control those who can,
network like gyspy moths in a Dutch elm,
take two creative writing courses
from a narcissistic mystagogue projecting
the fraud of the Wizard of Oz on the unsuspecting
listening to a firefly of talent talking like a starmap
about shining, about black holes and supernovas
dark energy and gravitational eyes, and the myriad galaxies
he teaches on the lower rung of a swing
in an institutionalized aviary of higher learning
as if the closest he's ever been to the light
was a dead starfish among the usual relics of a low tide
or sodden firecrackers of insight on a Halloween night.
He teaches you to take out whatever there was never much of
to put in. To strike the definite article
like crab grass out of your well-mown lawn
so you ending up writing in the patois of a robot.
Listen to this swarming starcluster of gnats
in the sunset of the word that's wondering
where all the songbirds went. Maybe it's me
and I've grown reactionary without knowing it
into a vicious old age but I swear my stomach
can't turn another page of a saddle-stitched chapbook
that reads the tea leaves in the broken skull-cup of the moon
like a bowl of soggy cornflakes that taste like breakfast haikus.
You can't live like a maggot and write
like a wounded dragon of the soul. You can't
paint a tsunami in watercolours and claim you know
what it's like to be caught up in the emotional undertow
of a tidal pool that threatened to sweep you out to sea
until your guru or your shrink reminded you like a tugboat
you have to sink before you can call yourself a shipwreck.
I think of Van Gogh. I think of the intensity of a man
of immense humanity, and it occurs to me if he were sitting
on your saffron sectional in your coffee-book living room,
going on obsessively about the nutritional value of cadmium yellow
you'd commit the same sin of omission and condemn him
to his solitude like an asylum for the underfed
listening to the voices in their head telling them
they're better off mad or dead than living on
the aesthetically modified junkfood
you dropp in their begging bowls like chump change.
And, o yes, wouldn't you just be the exception to the rule
who knew how to tell the difference between a sad joke
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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