28.1

I’m a menace to poetry. I exploit it, I dement it, I ruin it. I shouldn’t call what I write “poetry”. I shouldn’t call it anything. But alas, I do. Because sometimes I’m a bitch. Especially to literature.

But I guess it doesn’t really matter since no one will ever read it and I won’t have any angry Robert Frost fanboys/girls engulfing me with silly critiques and rants. Though I wouldn’t blame them. Hell, I don’t even like Frost and I would do the same to someone like me.
You gotta love privacy.

Yet, most of the time we don’t. We hate privacy. We want—no, NEED – to make everything public. We feel naked if we’re not exposed. We clad our ostentation in Helvetica and a cool blog name. We’re all just little attention whores who inject ourselves with coffee and stay up late so we can be original. Or at least tell ourselves we are.

It’s ok, though. Who am I to bitch about my own people? Well… Nevermind. I’m allowed. Just like we’re all allowed to bitch about our family.

At the same time though, it’s like we’re the ultimate superheroes of our contemporary literary culture. The ubiquitous exploiting of poetry, burning out of free-verse, miming of thoughtfulness. We’re pop art but with words. A lot of people argue that Andy Warhol is the best thing that happened to art and a lot of people say he’s the stupidest thing that happened to art. That’s kind of like us. A precious few have a method to their madness, but most of the time none of us know what the hell we’re doing. We puke on the keyboard and call it art. Why? Where does that leave everyone else? With a bunch of mental bulimics who call themselves brilliant. We could always shoot us to the moon. I always liked that idea.