It is not enough

It is not enough that I read Roberto Bolano

That I follow the trails he makes through Western literature

It is not enough to make of me a poet.

It is not enough

That I am obscure

And stuck in an oubliette of literary endeavour

Stuck there, waiting with Poe-like hope for some intrepid

Detective or scholar to drag me up

Into a common light.

Who am I trying to impress, anyway?

And in the reeds of a stagnant pool

A dead duck bobs and turns slowly, so that my face

Meets its face, bloated with decay

And our eyes briefly search each other out

(the dead duck and I)

and we gaze together, we exchange

information.

The duck knows what it's all about.

Werewolves

I am

writing a book

about

werewolves

it's getting brighter

the train is chock-a-block,
as they say

they're saying somebody died,

and we were told to get off

and everybody got off,

and we had to catch the next one
(which, of course,

was chocka
block)

you can still hear the sirens, actually

and it's getting brighter these days, with the sun

closer to the earth

and the fire season's coming, and everybody's talking about how they're going to

keep the trains running through the fire

season

and somebody screams in the carriage

somebody over there past the girls
the ones with the shitty songs leaking from their ears

and all the eyes turn and look, and somebody's screaming, saying

'stop talking to me, stop talking to me'

and other voices saying, calmly,
'we weren't talking to you, lady'

and now the sun's really low down,

and the shadows are long on the house roofs

and the trees have branches that look like fingers

and all these people in here,

packed in together, and you can still hear

a pin drop,

even over the sound of the train wheels turning

and the one over there, screaming

'i know what you are'

'i know
what you are'

To my future critics

To my future
critics, to all the haters

To the hacks, to the low-rent literary
shucksters, to the pushers of opinion, the poetry
pigs who snuffle in scat for a whiff of fame

To the vein, the forked-
penned, the silver-tongued professors,
to the limp-dicked pedants, the
pusillanimous po'mo
poseurs, to them,

I say:

I shall be wronged!

And
though your crime remains
uncommitted, though my work has yet
to disgust you, to bore you, to
offend your noble
aesthetic

I demand satisfaction.

We will fight to the death.
To the death of
letters.

Men must be men
about these things,
after all.

And should my wounds be
fatal, should I swoon and
fade in a cataract of my
own hot

blood -

well, sirs,

at least,
at LEAST

it will spare me the ignominy
of your
rejection.

my poetics

I actually don't know anything about poetry at all

except that sometimes you have to be drunk

and when you write it, you can't expect anybody to

understand it

because you don't really

understand it,

yourself