The Easy Way Out Poem

for everyone

Poetry's been dead a long time.
This ain't no Untitled Author
sharpening his tongue on a whetstone,
getting drunk and merry, ready
to write off Beowulf at the sup.

This ain't no blind man's elegy
to forever men doin' everything
that will ever have to be known.

Doves on the palisades--fucking doves.

Why couldn't you just write about the doves?

A blind man's tale creates many tales
for many blind men. Yes we do not know the truth.

Now we have bullets in place of arrows.
Same syllabic tendencies.

"Get up or I will end this right now,"
he says on the big screen, the big one
that they never had in Greece or Rome
or Hades--yes, I believe in ghostworlds.

Part Two

Yes the literary world is a dead zone.
A zone Stephen King sidesteps in his own world--
we should all get wrapped up in fantasy worlds
sometime soon, for the benefit of the doubt.
Capitalism. Get caught up in it.

Stop writing for yourselves.
Stop writing for yourself.

Start writing for every man.
Start writing the good word.
Start writing the words they know.

Limit your vocabulary.
Drink more alcohol.
Cut down on adjectives. Adverbs.
They exist because of use, not overuse.
But they exist, so cut down on them.

Minimalism. Raymond Carver. The voice.

No Joyce. No Oates. No death to us all
from above and beyond. We are survivors,
not the survived. We are endless ones,
so pull the pistol's trigger--
watch it give life--watch insanity abound!
Watch the planes in the sky!
Don't drop the glass on the stairs!
All things follow gravity!
A poem's failure is like all poems' failures--
too easy!