I’m suspicious of
Modern poetry
Really
Cynical.
It just makes me uneasy.
So uneasy, I can’t even tell what’s art anymore…
And that makes me feel tragic.
Something about upside-down urinals and
Taking a pair of scissors to a laundry pile of imagery…
It just makes me
Uneasy.

And yet, here I am
Sitting and typing an un-
Traditional poem.

Staring at the computer screen as I hear real poets do the inky starry black night sky, my eyes drying slowly in the white electrical light so that the contacts stand at attention, blurring my words.
( I heard that when you look at a TV or computer screen, you blink 7 times less than you do normally.)

No iambic pentameter, no five-seven-five schematics, not even any rhymes—
Nothing but the imagery.
Ah, (snap) and isn’t that the thing: the imagery is what makes the poetry.
And I’m such a sucky artist I don’t even have that to my name.
What a shame.

It’s like we play a game—
For fame (I guess?) we play a game
Of taking some high aim or another
And making a name out of a collection of stars
But it’s all really pretty lame in the grand scheme of things
And it’s really all the same
If it’s all the same to you…
Well it isn’t to me.

(there, a couple rhymes for you…I hope you enjoy
[I think])

(It’s at times like these when I sigh inwardly. I’ll never be a real poet.
I’ll never be a real artist.)

When I read these
Modern poems:
I dig!
Kinda…
I think…
Er…
(aren’t you supposed to just get this stuff? Like, just by being human?

But if just any human with just any degree of sensitivity gets this, automatically, then what is it that makes it art? And furthermore, (and possibly more importantly,) if everybody gets it, then how can anyone ever be…special?

In a world where the instantaneous is divinity and everything too slow is not worth our time,
I guess it’s hardly surprising to find the new short lines in poetry, the single words that you could read in a second, that supposedly evoke something like
Vibrant
Dark
Teary
Passion
In the heart of the reader.

I don’t know about that.
I thought art was supposed to go against the conventions of the time, not feed them.

In a world that values the instantaneous as divine I guess it’s hardly surprising that the youth
Would learn to sit at their computers and string together a few words that sound interesting together like colorful beads on a string and call it art.

I don’t know about that.
I always thought that art, you had to learn art.
You don’t just “get it” instantaneously.)

Maybe there’s something wrong with me.
Am I just so old-fashioned, so closed-minded, so shallow, so insensitive, that I just can’t understand this stuff?
I’m the one at fault: please, I beg, I’m on my knees, I’ve looked everywhere, I’m lost, I need to know—tell me how to change.
Because I’m obviously not the one in the right here.
If I was, I wouldn’t be so…
Uneasy.


but…
in spite of all this…
i find…
i want to write.
i...
love it.


interesting.

will wonders never cease.


But, well, I guess I am now the very embodiment of hypocrisy:
So I’ll sit and type a few cynical words on my computer about how people typing cynical words on their computers makes me uneasy
And then I’ll call it and refer to it as
art.
Just to see what happens.

Maybe then I can just write—
That is, something other than some lame, half-assed beaded necklace
(I have too many of those as it is, and summer camp’s over anyway).
And this whole thing with
Modern art with its urinals and
Modern poetry with its scissors and imagery
Won’t make me so uneasy.

Maybe then I can be a real poet.
Maybe even someday, somehow…I can learn to create real art.

Worse things have happened, I suppose.