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.