Blood on Her Prom Dress

Who Cares If You Read?
or The Poet as Problem
by Lonely Christopher

Poetry is a fancy for retards. Poetry is shall I compare thee to a summer’s day and I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Poetry means nothing and nobody is a friend of the poet. Poetry is a centripetal mode with a vacuum at its heart. Poetry was alchemical before it became a modern science --- back in the days when cavemen were chased by dinosaurs into volcanoes and the universe maintained stupid belief in the myth of its own objectivity. Poetry is a methodist religion with an absent god. Poetry is difficult because it is a form without a function; the form is the function. The poet is a technician specializing in antique mechanics. There is no such thing as “poetic language” and “semantic language” --- there are only sign systems. Poetry is a public service void of applicability but fat with uncurrent virtue. There is only language that begins and language that does not, and poetry is both of those. The composition of poetry is structural/conceptual; it has no relationship with anything of known importance. Poetry is daft faith. Contemporary poetics is a situation. I do not see how or why the situation should be otherwise. Why shouldn’t poetry be boring to the public? Poetry is lacking in poetry. The poet says, “I don’t know and I cannot or will not state why.” Poetry is revenge. Poetry is guilty of the double homicide of its ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her new boyfriend, ontology. Poetry is the same as talented children. Poetry is the surface of a lake. Poetry is a general education in the problematical. The universe is not a science; poetry is research. A simple substitution of “composer” for “mathematician” provides an answer to the situation. As long as the confusion I have described continues to exist, poetry welcomes the history of existence. The products of difference secure against ultimate significance. The result of influence is postwar, nonpopular, and promises the man in the street will cease to live. Poetry is the music of loving what destroys it; poetry is destroying love. I am not writing about your poetry. I am not writing about anything happy or anthropomorphic. I am not writing about the poetry of brains on the walls, I am writing about the architecture of the house where the tragedy took place all those years ago. I am writing about carpet samples and misanthropy. I am meaning my contemporariness, my visits to Youtube, and structural systems that don’t matter and never will. This document is sorry, really. Poetry is an adverb and a phrasal verb awkwardly necking in the backseat of a parked car; poetry is your dad crying when you tell him you’re gay; poetry is blood on her prom dress; poetry is what you don’t read. Who cares if you read?