Giving Up on Poetry

I promise to change my habits 

To read medicine jars, the prose of Yeats,

Sincere things without assurances.

I want only the galvanized electrolysis 

Of commercials and politics. 

Who needs all this camphor smelling 

19^th century loneliness?

Goodbye Keats. 

Goodbye Fingal and Armand Schwerner.

Goodbye Walt. 

I don’t need a brother.

I’ll go alone into the mineral dark.

I carry armloads of books to the trash.

I can’t see poisoning someone else with the stuff. 

Goodbye Robert Frost

(The loneliest poet 

Who ever lived, though there’s Lorca …)

For kicks I say good riddance to Gustav Mahler

Who was as friendless and musical as rain…