Refusal to Supplicate Before the New God

I've thrown many of my poems away. Maybe they were worth saving. I thought they were worth hearing, but they weren't heard, and I threw them out. I'm alright with this. I've made my peace. The greatest treasures are buried at the bottoms of oceans, scattered among the wreckage. Only a few divers go down that deep, and only a few will know what they've got when they uncover it.

Most lies in the wreckage. The rest never got spilled onto paper--in the ink bottle still coagulating. I wonder if it's worth pulling the stopper out to let the air in, to let the words out.

There's all this chattering, all around me, chattering almost incoherent from open mouths filling the world with suffocating foam. Little black eyes, fat little ears with cauliflower spirits, the well doesn't go down deep, the wells don't go down at all. Like fake pockets sewn onto pants, stitched up at the top so nothing can enter.

You want to be read, to be heard, to find listening, to communicate something real. I almost feel the response coming automatically. Why should they listen? What is there to hear? Where does it all go? The flow of the river, it carries over the hill, into the horizon, into the receding lines beyond the world of experience, into the burning lava of the sunset and heat lines refracting in the atmosphere--melting all the universe, melting all our lives, melting all experience. The river carries over the lines, but where it goes from there? Does it end in the final place where the overheld breath, blue with lungs ballooning, releases in a lovely sigh of flow past a blockage?

At the end of the day, the readers want what they've already read, publishers want what they've already published. The same stale lives, the same stale words, the same stale eyes staring out from behind the pages. Something pithy, something trite, empty of spirit but heavily vulgar. How profound to glorify the lowest.

I don't want poems for orgies in the sewer. But all the Authorities long ago conceded that beauty is a corpse, and the Lover is a necrophile. But the Necrophile is a poet, a seer, an artist, a prophet. Hail to the new god, hail to the king. His spirit pours forth as black seepage from his bowels, and we supplicate on our knees--mouths open, children watching.