A Tongue in Cheek Treatise of Caution to the Intellectuals Out There

Creativity is the jetpack that allows you to soar above
the jejune pedestrians. Docile in their domiciles,
they rarely look up. So feel free to wave a hello
if they ever do but only stop in the event of an emergency.

The further you propel yourself then the more you might
veer further into a cultural no man’s land, where the drones
that dopily paid no mind to you like any other bird in the sky
have been devoured by the zombies of ignorance.

Find a pedestal, land atop and never get off
because the jackals down there want fresh flesh
and you’re all gushy softness. Hardened and pockmarked scum,
they want to suck the idyllic marrows of your brain bones, siphon
‘til the dryness is dry. Brittle and languid in anguish, squish
your eyelids together so tightly that they fuse and maybe they
won’t hoover the x-factor out of you. Your je ne sais quoi
becomes their foie gras, that certain something that they spread
on their white bread mundane.

Let them build their own means of conveyance, fly lower
and feel them drag you under. Dumb yourself down
for your bosses, your loved ones, your compatriots
and destroy what essentially makes, divines, creates
and drives you to heights inconceivable.

To Be Read After Most Anything I Wrote in Grad School

I.
This obscene man you see standing up here,
right before your fresh-out-out-of-a-dishwasher
-steaming glassy eyes is just an eggshell of who
he was when he wrote those other poems. Tenuously
feigning the robust, just go ahead and drop him to see
the fragility of his ego splatter translucence and yellow.

Nowadays, the workaday life’s need for rigor has strangled
the vigor out of him and he eats, lies in bed, never calls or visits
the plethoric cadre of friends he’s acquired over the years,
but instead does nothing. This is the first thing he has written
in an age of apocalypse: where life tastes like dry rye toast.

Familiar and nourishing, but not satisfying and so where
is the butter, the margarine, the cream cheese, the jam, the jelly,
the preserves, compotes, and other such spreads that add empty
calories, yes, but flavor as well? Banality is giving up and giving in,
paired with those prepositions then “giving” becomes the cruelest charity.

II.
Nobody cares that you write poetry, music and the like.
That's unless you turn a profit doing it or perhaps you

turn into a prophet doing it. I think if I were to have
the latter happen then it would somewhat resemble

the Python's Life of Brian. Most people who know me
would probably expect me be waiting with open arms

like Journey's Steve Perry and that every time I pen
something, that's what I'm waiting for... to be a messiah

with my face on merchandise of every possible imagining.
To be the Hello Kitty of the poetry world, my face
with a pink bow on everything from toasters to vibrators.

Just like there is always a "but" then there must be an "until"
and the "until" in these scenarios always involves a fall. It is
probably better to stay under appreciated for a majority

of your life and lauded as your chi starts to fade
like Bukowski did. But wait, he hated that

and I would hate that too.

Through

I dreamt that I could see the universe through a crack in my ceiling.

Not just the night empyrean but actually as if I were floating

through space. A bold voyager, drifting in my bed

with eyes affixed upward, on equal footing with the stars.



There was no more sky only this blackness,

where color and lights were more vivid

as my apartment coasted like the USS Enterprise

with the bedroom as the bridge. Flying solo,

me as my own Mr. Sulu,

manning the navigational controls

through alternating listless and mesmerized gazes

at the vastness unknown, my hands were laying folded

near my solar plexus feeling the solar winds

off this universe’s sun pushing me onward

like a cosmic junk ship.



No need for warp drive, just glide and float forever.