ALL THESE BUSY BUSY ENTREPRENEURIAL POETS

ALL THESE BUSY BUSY ENTREPRENEURIAL POETS

All these busy, busy entrepreneurial poets

trying to substitute their usefulness for talent.

If you can’t sing well enough to bear your own voice

to get lovers and applause on your own merits,

manage a band, control those who can,

network like gyspy moths in a Dutch elm,

take two creative writing courses

from a narcissistic mystagogue projecting

the fraud of the Wizard of Oz on the unsuspecting

listening to a firefly of talent talking like a starmap

about shining, about black holes and supernovas

dark energy and gravitational eyes, and the myriad galaxies

he teaches on the lower rung of a swing

in an institutionalized aviary of higher learning

as if the closest he’s ever been to the light

was a dead starfish among the usual relics of a low tide

or sodden firecrackers of insight on a Halloween night.

He teaches you to take out whatever there was never much of

to put in. To strike the definite article

like crab grass out of your well-mown lawn

so you ending up writing in the patois of a robot.

Listen to this swarming starcluster of gnats

in the sunset of the word that’s wondering

where all the songbirds went. Maybe it’s me

and I’ve grown reactionary without knowing it

into a vicious old age but I swear my stomach

can’t turn another page of a saddle-stitched chapbook

that reads the tea leaves in the broken skull-cup of the moon

like a bowl of soggy cornflakes that taste like breakfast haikus.

You can’t live like a maggot and write

like a wounded dragon of the soul. You can’t

paint a tsunami in watercolours and claim you know

what it’s like to be caught up in the emotional undertow

of a tidal pool that threatened to sweep you out to sea

until your guru or your shrink reminded you like a tugboat

you have to sink before you can call yourself a shipwreck.

I think of Van Gogh. I think of the intensity of a man

of immense humanity, and it occurs to me if he were sitting

on your saffron sectional in your coffee-book living room,

going on obsessively about the nutritional value of cadmium yellow

you’d commit the same sin of omission and condemn him

to his solitude like an asylum for the underfed

listening to the voices in their head telling them

they’re better off mad or dead than living on

the aesthetically modified junkfood

you drop in their begging bowls like chump change.

And, o yes, wouldn’t you just be the exception to the rule

who knew how to tell the difference between a sad joke

and the rage of a sacred fool eating his palette like buttered toast.

I think of all the poets that have been crucified

as a proxy for you like kings and queens of the waxing year,

as you try to step into their shoes like the waning twin

who isn’t Orphically dismembered between July and December

to ensure the creative fertility of your cloned cornflakes.

Merd! Rimbaud screamed as he stuck a knife

through the hand of a pompous muse-molesting poetaphile

and abandoned his rational dissociation of the sensibilities,

denying he ever wrote poetry, to run guns in Ethiopia.

A temper tantrum over the point size of your name

on a poetry poster and the publishing hierarchy

that sorts the planets out from the shepherd moons

by the order in which you’ve been asked to read

isn’t the same as the creative demonism of a real enfant terrible.

You can’t rent a ghost in a creative writing class

and then wear its deathmask around as if your persona

were tragically haunted by the past. Or pretend

you’re a bad ass from a bourgeois suburb where

the closest you ever got to a slum

was your Mommy’s makeshift studio basement

and an album cover you shot on the wrong side of the tracks.

Fifteen minutes of fame in a photo op with a candleflame

isn’t enough to shed a lot of light on a regressively darkling world,

or even turn the head of a single sunflower.

You need more than a flashlight to get a rose to bloom.

You might be the loudest toad on the biggest lily pad

in a small pond, sounding off like popcorn

in the lobby of your own double-feature,

but you lick your sticky fingers clean with a long tongue

when you sup with the devil like an award-winning liar

and there’s no long oar of a spoon in your lifeboat.

And even when you claim to be a damselfly in distress

I don’t see any starmud caked on your winged heels

after you say you crushed the head of the snake

that bit Persephone in the spring while she gathered wildflowers.

You might sleep with the Lord Of Jewels, but who said

you could sing? Though I like the bling

of all your dangling participles ringing like wind-chimes

in synch with the dissonant cosmic hiss of universal bliss.

Kunaikos. Dog. In classical Greek. Diogenes the Cynic

asked Alexander to get out of his light, not turn it off

because the music was over and all there was left to glean

were the random seed words of an abandoned alphabet

that will never come to flower like sacred syllables

in the mouths of scavenging birds pecking among the pebbles

at the feet of a crucified scarecrow where the literati

are rolling snake eyes for the emperor’s new clothes.

What did Horace say when he’d had enough?

Terence, this is stupid stuff. As the cynics bark

like barnyard dogs at every shadow and blade of grass

that moves in the dark woods beyond the knotted chains

of their dying dactyls while the wolves bay elegiacally at the moon.

Which page of this book did you suffer the most to write?

Clever the way you put the climax of the narrative on the cover.

Best place to hide is out in the open. And, my God,

just look at the quality of the quotes you’ve

called into court like a twitter account to verify

your inability to write an alibi for why

your works aren’t literate enough to speak for themselves.

Odious the stink of number 2 book paper and hot ink.

Worse the lack of the use of your nose when you’re writing.

Or the way you abuse your eyes by looking at the world

through a glass darkly as if you were aging the wines of life

like a total eclipse of the new moon in an antique inkwell

no one draws inspiration from anymore since the bottom

fell out of the bucket when you replaced the Pierian spring

with an unenlightened fire hydrant in a volunteer fire brigade.

And who more reasonable than you about

all the aesthetic atrocities going on in the world.

When murder is done I know of no one

more eloquent than you about not raising your voice

for fear of polarizing the situation unnecessarily.

But peace isn’t a euphemism for cowardice

and if your words aren’t guilty of precipitating a confrontation

then your critically acclaimed silence is complicit.

When did the sheep start practising hunting magic?

When did the m.b.a.s start chanting like Druids

and the gleemen of the king make a jest of their calling?

Are you still experimenting with taking all those

tiny fractals and digital pixels of retinal experience

and one day elaborating them by cutting and pasting

into a unified field theory of the visionary continuum

that focuses on the infrastructure of the scaffolding

at the expense of Michelangelo who had to scramble up on it

like monkey bars in a playpark to paint the origin of the species

as he saw it in his imagination before the plaster dried?

Here, if you give me an award, I’ll make one up of my own

and give it back to you in return. That way everyone

can feel special about their mediocrity. Watch out, Mozart

here comes the lunar fire of the lime they throw on your corpse

like desiccated moonlight before the dirt. Burn, baby, burn.

The fire hydrants are learning to play the harpsichord like amputees.

And Keats is trying to pick out a more buoyant font

than the lead of his despair to write his name in water.

The roots are dead, the leaves are gone, the blossom flown,

the fruit has dropped and the branches dry and brittle

as an old woman’s bones. Pageants of funeral barges

floating down the Thames like the wilting lilies

of long-necked swans that used to make

the most beautiful compound bows out of the arrows

of their fletched reflections. The timber clear cut

and the underbrush flogged to death by the bush hogs

and snarling chain saws in the mountains of the muses.

What do you think, is Shakespeare still out there somewhere

leafing the stumps with the magic rods of his imagination?

Is all the world still a stage, the airy nothing

he gave a local habitation and a name, or merely the dream

of the crone mother of the muses on her death bed, Mnemosyne,

reaching for a cellphone, trying to remember who she was

before they erased her on facebook and disconnected the internet?

PATRICK WHITE