PROOF THAT POETRY IS,

AT LONG LAST,

DEAD AND GONE:

TREVOR NEWBERRY

I love the hell out of you, reader, and I wish my publications were only printed

in the print-versions, but everyone knows how effing expensive vellum

is these days, so maybe they should start thinking all mise-en-page, gold leafed

indigo-d illuminations of poems by, like, monks or whatev, like they used to do

with Christine de Pisan and Montaigne and all those guys, and the monks

could just sit there all day, wearing their weird balding haircuts like wedding bands

on their skulls and relish how the imagistic pulchritude floods through them

like dreams of S&M, and they’d read the lines over and over to themselves and sometimes

to their secret girlfriends who’d put out more because of all the devastating

beauty, and let them do it doggy-style instead of, I don’t know, missionary because

of their soul-meltingly gorgeous illuminated poetry, the colors, the colors,

the big capital paper-thin letters at the beginning of every line and the space in-between

couplets where, in balmy morning dreams, they’d pretend they lived,

tiny duplexes running along the white space between stanzas, like my street at home,

where they’d get their mail every day and drink good-for-the-price wines

instead of that sacramental Welch’s grape juice garbage, and they’d have a black Lab

who licks their face to wake them up in the morning, and he’ll have to get up

and out into the cold so the dog doesn’t shit on the carpet and, eventually,

he’ll get so wrapped up in the good life of Manwiches, Seinfeld re-runs, and nookie

that he’ll quit illuminating poems, give up monk-ing all together and go on a trip

to Phoenix or somewhere and the girlfriend will call and demand a ring, and then

tell him that she’s banging the neighbors, and he’ll be so depressed that he’ll start drinking

double-bourbons instead of chianti and smoking a pack and a half a day, Winstons,

and never see her again, though, he might go back to poetry because the internal is all

some of us humans have when our hearts harden and sit like stones in our chests,

something to soften the stool of our souls, the bullshit of being, because when

the world forgets you exist and you feel like hooking your toe around a rifle trigger

or when you’re finally able to fall in love again, when the anguish wears thin

like the over-kissed marble feet of saints’ statues, when the new She plants her lips

on yours and she’s sopping, writhing bare on your sheets and—wait, why are you still reading?