Poetry Is Not Beautiful

Poetry is not beautiful
poems are not even pretty,
not even
a little bit,
not even from any corner of the
I.

Poetry is willful, it is a Deceiver, it is the Jack
of the kingless and the Knave of the foolish,
it is ugly and sinful, it lusts into
all realms that are held darkly in our heart
of hearts where
the fear breaks through into
waves of suspended animation
into reckless abandon
and childish dreams built upon stilted frames
of castles that damn the sun and release
the hounds of war,
release the sick and the lame
in the limitations of our own fate,
reassembling (or resembling?)
that finely etched gravity
of what we call "saving face".

Poems are filthy dirty and depraved insinuations
they are an earwig crawling through the ear
gnawing the brain through as it comes out the other side,
poems are despicable,
poems are disgusting--
they are riots of untold glory gone mad with desire,
they are flesh-eating microbes of uncertainty,
they are vultures waiting for the Poets' last throes
in gnarled and bleeding hands,

writing of nothing, of absolutely nothing at all.