Only Dead Poets Are Famous

This poem is to be published
a lifetime after my timely death,

when jaundiced papyrus curls the
corners of cigarette-burnt edges,
surrounding scratches cut and
pasted together without wasting
whited-out words on artificially-
intelligent electronic screens
exhaling synthetically heated breezes,
before I suffocate under gray hairs
from unburied balding dust bunnies.

Only dead poets are famous,
but obsolete art can’t save us.

Previously published as the “Poem of the Week” by Zygote in my Coffee Issue #114, and featured in the Scars Publication chapbook Poems of Pain Volume 3: The War of Art.