to be continued

everyone on the web’s now a poet
an artist
poetic artist
and sometimes they’re also photographers
who do weddings and meetups.
Poetic photographer artists then?

in the old days say

about five or six years ago
or maybe ten or fifteen when
i was in class learning how
it was more difficulter
to get noticed without appearing
wearing a hooded leather winter coat and shades and
tweaking and sweating through hazy paranoid bravado
at the community college creative writing class to read
from your own commissioned textbook you know
your own poems created in writing class and for
homework and freaking out catholic teen girls
with your poems about burning her white cat fluffy alive or
at least you might as well have been burning her fluffy charred cat
alive right there in class reading
your hazy brave unpoems on the overdose death
of a god who fucked about and all this with cannabis
and dangerous drugs

would it perhaps have been a better statement then

to grab her stupid cat right from the hand carved pages of her homework
cut out its liver alive and set it alight on her student desk?
would she have learned she didn’t have to try to be a poet?
would she have gone to the anthropology class instead?
would she have cared her stupid cat was dead? probably
it would have caused a wok sized stir and big Tom college security chief
would have been summoned from his cosy poker
made a brief and scenic arrest and dragged off a poet
jailed him in his trailer office a while while
proper cops came in real black and whites with cuffs

was it ever even about making a statement though?
wasn’t it more about saying clever paragraphs
getting people to think back backwards?

course if i’d known about the internet back then

if there’d been an internet in the desert
i could have just ordered free business cards with
poet on them in one of five or six bold fonts
with an email address and maybe my cell number and
paid only the postage and gone about creating
blogs and publishing all the daft thoughts that drip
constantly unmetered from my sore fingers
i would not have needed to go
to all the trouble of learning graphic design
on the pastor’s apple back in the 1984 kitchen and smoking
all that dope in 1996
wouldn’t have needed to go to kinko’s at death of night
having worked there all death of day
to make perfect citylight sized books
saddle stitch them then
cover up the saddle stitching with awfully creative binding
do not try this at home
to make sure a catholic teen girl didn’t wind up tetanus shot at e r
for cutting her fingers on a rusty staple to be continued

epilogue

somewhere in her catholic dream universe

a non-charred cat has a poetry blog of her own now


Copyright © 2012 J A Lee