“The discourse around poetry has a bit of a joy problem.”

(for Jad Abumrad)
We try to shoot a bouquet from our sleeve,
out comes a broom. The rabbit shits in our hat. We
hack softshoe, rocking a terrified chimpanzee rictus,
spangly leotard riding up asscrack. We plead:
laugh with us, laugh at us,
scream, cry, throw up, please just feel anything.

Feel everything.

We get in the lab. Rabbits have two kinds of shit, one that they leave,
one that they eat.
Posing hypotheses, our theories like toddler shoes,
good for 8-12 weeks.
We control+F for certainty: this search returned no results. Eyes tuned microscopic,
developing a live-virus vaccine against despair.
We Bunsen.
We Beaker.
They Statler and Waldorf.

Huddle up, team. They are dragging our asses on Podcast Twitter.
They said we’re soft and serious, we’re velvet waistcoat.
They said it’s not that deep, it is what it is,
all the famous poets are dead, better learn a TikTok dance.
They’ve got an AI Walt Whitman with cat whiskers singing open-mouth dialup modem.
They could give a fuck about a red wheelbarrow, who ate whose plums. 
If it doesn’t nick an artery, they ain’t got time for it. 

We got this, though. 
We’ve all been poets since before we were born.
The first words were a poem and the first poem was a dirge
a linen bandage stuffed into a sucking chest wound. We play placebo paramedics,
first aid and last rites. Cyclic and cryptic, cicadas birthed from the dirt,
if not for our drumming they’d forget how to sing.

Let’s stop dicking around:
What is poetry for?
What is a blowtorch for?
To light a blunt.
To burn down your own home.
To scatter the wolves past the edge of the campsite.
To weld a monument to heaven. 

To weld a monument to heaven.