Advice to a Budding Literary Critic:
Start with Edgar Allen Poe.
End with Edgar Allen Poe.
Hire a detective to track down your real father.
Once your adult teeth have set in, floss first and then brush.
Lick a speeding train.
Survive crossing the Gobi on foot.
Fuck, then extort, James Woods, Michiko Kakutani, or Zadie Smith.
Alternatively, necromance Charles Baudelaire.
Forget angels don’t visit graveyards.
Frequent them anyways.
Recall everything is permitted because nothing endures.
Start with us.
End with us.



minutes, times, hours:
if a poem fails
no one is squashed
no one goes bankrupt
no dies of syphilis or cancer
no milk curdles

it's worse—
time
is wasted