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I MEAN POEMS

From Adelaide to Morgantown
They come looking for mean poems.

Poems to deflate a monster truck,
Poems that release little secrets
Like a thousand white mice
At the opening ceremonies of some Viciousness Olympics.

I mean poems.

I don't mean shticky insults
Compiled from a list of adjectives
Shakespeare or Captain Haddock likes.

Art relates the lived experience
That so often comes with feelings,
Thank God. Poems use only words.

Meanness, a rude complicity
With keeping life painful,
Is hard to live with in the day to day.
We know from passing cars
What mean people do.

It makes great theater, though.

A poem is a play you can take anywhere, is it?
What if it isn't. What if poems
Are like those organisms that ran the ocean
For millions of years, just a sheet of cells
A single cell thick.

What if the poetry world
Is basically a less popular version
Of boy scouting.

And poets just transcendence addicts,
As the magazine articles keep tsking.

This would be a mean poem, then.
A poem treating other poems badly,
Seemingly unaware of its tendency
To impute its qualities to others.

Just like everybody else.

You seekers of mean poems,
I hope you get the back rubs, orgasms, and windfalls
You clearly need.

As for me and my poems,
We refuse to stop being cheerful
Or to give up growing.