————

———————–

Playing the Dutch Waiter in Last Position

I fold,

No more good writers

No more good writing

No more solace in waking up in a stranger

No more shame in not enough money for a drink

No more liver left to seek splendor from regardless

No more form:

no style

no tricks

no body

no muses

no great American novel (Franzen is doing just fine)

No more scanning the obituaries for Cohen or Kundera

No more gratitude

No more live shows

No more looking for her in the audience

No more autodidacts or clairaudients or daft aesthets of the blogosphere

No more critics

No more advances

No more binding contracts

No more grievances

No more heritage at all:

no history

no roots

no instauration (surely)

no old

no new

I fold,

My head is like a chimney and my stomach churns with a jagged hatred mixed with acid-reflux in recent mornings (feeling like John Kennedy Toole making roguish cocktail banter in the limbo cabaret about Snooki’s book contract with Simon & Schuster)

and then I get a phone call

about a new bit of verse overdue

and out of spite, like an overdose

I’ll sit around like Christian chastity

and manage to write a new epic poem

sagely titled “Fistfucking a Republican”

———-