ditch,

...But the poets are still scribbling thoughts in a tousled room with one swaying light bulb, a refrigerator stacked with stolen condiments, using face cloths for toilet paper. And they're volunteering now – to keep the poetry moratorium off-bay because this is how it is: a small hill with five thousand peasants at the bottom, rifling through their pockets to throw paper planes at the heads of these men, who probe wax into their ears, and ignore the ruffled dialect because of the way it was transported. Who sit at their red oak desks, playing with typewriters as sottish men banging on Xylophones... And gaping in the mirror, and then back to the framed pictures of Joyce glued to their ceilings... Who guesses when the next piece will win the Pulitzer? Who put out the poetry moratorium because there was too much work? Who are these editors who kill poetry today? Who dares publish this poem? Who dares roll down the hill? In fact, don't publish this – you can't afford the milk-crate. The luxury of a lunatic shouting for the whole world, an urban monk laughing hysterically on the side of the highway. Don't stand on the street. Paint it on the walls of bus shelters, coffee shops, sidewalks, and on the backs of wandering police. Post it on the news. Set fire to your own home and, on the air, you can tell them that you did it, not for Yeats, that you did it with kerosene.

Tell them that publishers can't treat poets like self-glorified politicians. Tell them that we are hungry. Tell them how a piece of the ocean winked at you under the moon, tell them how you winked back. The surf whispered every word of your poem. Tell them that you collapsed in the reef, that sand blew over your chest, that you have never seen anything so dense and so loose. You felt compromised. Tell them that the only beautiful things that exist in the world are things without explanation. Or write about sitting on your front step after dinner and watching the leaves of an oak tree desperately clang together. Tell them to put down their scalpels and microscopes, to put their ears to the floor. Then let's see what they think of a poem.

It's been too long since they heard an ant scratching its mandibles, and hoisting an elephant over its shoulder. Tell them to watch it fail. Tell them that its diligence was the only victory there was.

Understand that you're undermining everything you love.

Go to skid-row and hear the howling of the broken heart, watch it rise from the ashes like a phoenix with four ounces of Brandy. See the lips: mouthing the hum of the wheels, the clacking of the shopping cart, as it's brimming with cans. Astonishing, isn't it: the alcoholic, coveting the shells of his addiction like a snail on a beach, lurching towards undulating whitecaps. He is Icarus. This is not the KGB. This is not the Gestapo. This is not bribing border police in West Africa, or shelling out fifty pesos to get away with murder. This is robbery, emotional robbery. Fuck Joyce. Fuck Bukowski. Let's not dedicate the rest of our lives recovering every speckled ash from four snow-ridden corners of the earth. We would be reconstructing symphonies with a lame hand and a blotto trumpet.

Nobody needs pixilated violins. We need a light fixture that has all of the charisma of a noose. We need to keep our ears to the floor at all times.

  II