What a blessed world of snivelling nobodies we live in!

Oil of vitriol must be applied.

          —Ralph Waldo Emerson

A group

of men

dictates

Mister X

to be the

finest writer

of the past

few decades.

That group

with quite similar

tastes and aesthetics,

as well as parallel

apathy to engagement,

both social and political,

draws others to it

like chicken to feed,

pigs to troughs,

or cows to bales of hay.

Its opinion

permeates increasingly

like an oil spill into a harbor

or fumes into a town or city

propagated by a member

of the chamber of commerce.

Its opinion

hardens more and more

like adipose deposits in arteries

or a viagara-induced erection

until it appears as if objective

and none dare otherwise contest it,

well, almost none…

Besides excellence—oh, but of course!—,

the editors often boast, in chorus, how open

they are

to style, theme, and subject matter.

One of them, however, wrote with evident

scornful implication and close-mindedness to

my chosen theme, if not style, that there

Yet nobody had ever sued me for defamation;

while for the other denigration, a Chief Justice*

had argued convincingly that the First Amendment

But unlike the First, that editor’s magazine was,

* Chief Justice William O. Douglas also noted that the “prime function” of the First “was to keep

debate open to ‘offensive’ as well as to ‘staid’ people.”

The nation is overrun with editors

and vast quantities of poetry magazines,

one indistinguishable from the next,

few at all having a distinct focus other

than poesy for the sake of poesy,

as if the genre’s intrinsic purpose

were to entertain and divert the populace.

Yet Villon, Saro-Wiwa, Jeffers, and others

—not that many, of course—would have

argued poetry to be potentially much more

than wit and verb in the court of power.

Yet his actions and the reality of his fairly large

publication prove the topic not pertinent for him.

Nor have I forgotten that indeed a whole world

of people out there love anything

the giant media corporations decide to spin

from Brittney Spears to, of course, poetry.
 

These masters of

doublespeak

and other

convoluted jabber

aren’t

very

convincing at all.