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A friend of mine, somewhere between his first
and second bottle of Mad Dog, sputtered
that poets have run their course here on Earth. No more
ideas, fresh from (hic) what we neo-
critics refer to as "creative springs,
complete with an official cluck of his tongue.
But supposing he was right; do poets down
in poetry shops across the state, hell, all
across the world, cry as they lock their doors
and shut the flashy neon lights off? Sure,
we could sprint to the union headquarters
and form the usual picket lines, but time
has worn us down; can't fight the lack
of new material to whip into
a hotcake-selling market, free from
the standard "man against nature", the "woes
of love and lust", and my personal pick, the "muse
of death".
Eventually, because
us poets don't hear no, we don't back down,
we'd build an interstellar rocket ship
and load it full of staples needed for
a space discovery voyage: paper, pens,
bananas and other fruit (to fight scurvy),
champagne (to open at our arrival at -).
But by the time some chipper kid foresaw
that, quite simply, Whitman's shoes would not be filled
in a new outer space commune, we'd be
too far - and likely lost - to turn around.
And what a loss. For even then we'd have found
a new direction: the beauty of solar storms,
forgotten corkscrews deep in space, and Tate
at zero gravity. We'll toss a few
sporadic rescue notes, along with first
draft sonnets, but hey - it's big out here
in space, and should someone miraculously
find bottled notes and worthy poems, they'd
be quickly passed as rubbish and thrown away.
A.T. FISH
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