“The Neurotic Perfectionism of Artificial Scarcity”

The literary game is like being a virgin,
It’s the catch-22 that without first getting laid
No one will sleep with you.
And you constantly obsess over trivialities like the way you dress.
You think you just can’t do it properly,
That everyone else has some secret
Which they are constantly making money from
Putting out ordered lists.
As an emotion in pixels,
Squares of morale like little trigrams,
Cry like the Delta blues,
Bits of carrying on piecing my lonely journey together.
I can see the meticulous beauty of chicken scratch Chinese,
Like wispy forms in the blocks of graph paper
Her exercise books laid out,
On the floor with a mattress for a bed.
Penned in her own red
That she was lacking,
In what comes to the native
Speaker the most natural thing in the world.


“When Acclaim Outweighs the Vital”

Too much around that some to like,
When did pretension become a high art
The poor pen may ask
As much as the street person is often a master of glibness,
I have seen the grandiosity of language that runs as deep
As civilization itself, with its contrived futility
Like arguing with a judge who holds power over one’s sentencing!
How silly your excellence is on precarious chairs
Who privilege justification for greedy excesses that never trickle down
But in the form of meritocracies of debt and addiction.
A tedious ruling that makes of a sane objector some contentious rebel;
A loner of those who graffiti over patronizing voices of ads
Explaining how to live from a mansion of incontrovertible bullshit.
If we could eat as a result of your precious pronouncements;
If they could build a consciousness of all human beings as worthy of a place to live for the future to live in,
Perhaps I wouldn’t be so struck by the anodyne boredom of a culture that tells us it’s the best.
Maybe we might go outside into a world we contributed to make
Hearing the echoes of our prefigured yawps down the canyons of human possibility,
And walk off the standard of the bourgeois clock premised on no digit which grants the masses their liberty.
Those figures, whose canned applause
Triggers our consent for their impoverished masterpieces,
I tell you fame is really only an ersatz
Cosmic belonging. For what an otherwise unknown person would give
Simply for a friend. Simply a lover is better than
All of the loving fame after one is dead.
A simple natural scene is better than
All the best paintings about it.