Let's workshop this poem about a man at the mercy of "kids these days" who, despite being seen by their families as sweet flowers in need of protection from corruption, make some rather brazen demands
Hotel Motel Holiday Inn
It was family wisdom
(eye-signaled at holidays)
never to leave
budding daughters alone
around the man, and yet
these teenyboppers—
split-screen—
were the ones squelching
his teary oaths of love
in zip-it demand for more
rounds of gag fingers
down the throat.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)