Let's workshop this poem about how the depths of human credulity, credulity even when it comes to the most pathetic failures of imagination, can séance forth intense suicidal ideation in the educated
Parker Brothers Ouija
Pity all these suckers who trust
their stunted imagination,
yes—but also all their ghosts
reduced to tipping brooms over,
scurrying like squirrels
in incest attics; all their aliens
reduced to trampling corn
as lamely as night hoaxers,
fisting the occult’s wettest groupies.
“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)
Pity all these suckers who trust
their stunted imagination,
yes—but also all their ghosts
reduced to tipping brooms over,
scurrying like squirrels
in incest attics; all their aliens
reduced to trampling corn
as lamely as night hoaxers,
fisting the occult’s wettest groupies.