Dear Numbnuts, letter 1

This isn’t that clever, you know.

A self-help essay in the form

of poetry to and for the self,

a stab at a self-deprecate

that wants to negate the stab

while winking about the stab

with a grin aimed to generate

the stab.

Remember when irony was dead,

then reinvented, then

stronger than ever?

It’s dead, again, thanks to this

exact type of tripe.

The reader may delight

in the poet’s lack of regard

for the insight of an essayist,

flat on his back, the beach,

the freezing sand,

just as the reader will attest

to the essayist’s lack

of poetic skills regarding the balance

of language and time,

not to mention rain from a low sky,

the tide way out.

Poetry does not examine the head;

poetry, not meaning anything

after all, does not dig beneath a shimmering

spleen of surface, will not eat

mold; answers aren’t

to be found on the nail

the hammer tries to drive

against the grain, the nail of symmetry

when not altruism when not

aphorism when not metaphor soiling

the coat of unsolicited sympathy.  Not

this new path you perambulate about so,

to differentiate from some old

archive of a self you keep trying

to escape.  Your old self

walks beside you, still,

that ringing between your ears

the hearing aids won’t correct,

not some looped drive

created by loud DNA;

it’s the knife you never mention,

it’s you howling at age, inventing

language because you have

no language for how you are, this

language sounding like so much

unbearably high-pitched tire

on a taut ecstatic asphalt, going down

your new path.

So it goes,

M---

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas