After Careful Consideration

Let's workshop this bitch!

After Careful Consideration

The poems of mine magazines readily go for/
are not the ones born of conscientious care,/
organizational craftsmanship and re-vision,/
firepower channeled to ends of disclosure—/
even, and perhaps especially, when they call/
for scrupulous rereading and quiet reflection./  
My deliberately nonsense poems (zany baloney/
salted with my-truth howlers and colorless green/
ideas, with haphazard associations that mirage/
depth)—these blagues (spoofs of the standard/
workshop trumpery), cousins to bot-translated/ 
phishing emails (“jail at night turns yours when/
dressed evenings”), are the pieces that editors/
glom onto (and find downright irresistible if/
tossed in are terms that flatter the pc ideology/
of grievance): “Fiat currencies at heart, cloaked—/ 
my hands, fragmented totems, scrape up rat/
memoirs involuted as if lichen on grindstone./
Trans hands, pearl serpents, weep in arced shame/ 
for coral short ago organed to electric shadow.”/
At first my hoaxes were sting operations meant/
to plumb the depth of literary fallenness. Now/
they are my way to cope with it, a decadence—/ 
glove-fit to our things-mean-whatever-I-feel,/
allegation-is-guilt, ethos—too rooted for hope.//

“For is it any wonder,” a professor said to me,/
“that this is so? Go back to Melville and Twain:/
the conman is congenital to the American heart/
if not to any heart pruned by natural selection./
Attention the lust of the lazy-ADHD philistines/
we are, what do you expect in our plastic-surgery/
sea of abs-in-six-weeks schemes, college degrees/
(long no better than strip-mall blackbelts) now/
trophied out just for participating in classrooms/
of “dialectical anti-patriarchy mass-interpolated/
at midnights into Lacanian screams,” classrooms/
guaranteed “safe” for those so coddled by meds/
and bling-culture emptiness, by Disney films/
and commercial jingles, as to be unable to stand/
robust diversity, non-superficial divergence?/
Colleges placing activism over learning, backing/
post-truth antagonism to logic and objectivity—/
what can you expect the poetry to look like/
from a people of social-media superficiality,/
who are pro-consumption and anti-education/,
who find actors prime presidential material,/
who endorse dunderheaded conspiracy theories,/
who prefer the four-four basics of pop music,/
who think ‘unidentified’ means extraterrestrial,/
who say politicians can overrule scientists?”

*This poem appeared in Cholla Needles (2022)

Painting by Cézanne: “Young Man and Skull”