POET LAUREATE OF HELL

is what I seek to become, because why swoon and slather over fame
in some sparsely or even populous city-state saturate and dizzy
with mall-to-mall glitz and glitter of deafening “buy-me buy-me's,
jewelers hawking each corner of every artery of the one true church
gaggling enough gaudy gems to glut several third world countries
of bloated childbellies, and circumscribed fully by bumper-to-bumper
smogmachines and their get-there-yesterday Armani suits hyped on
road rage, mud-thick caffeine and and cellphone drunkenness
screeching past garish megaplexes with their latest slasher flicks or
fraught with daft and derelict comedy buffoons, silicone-infused floozies
and their salivating wilderbeasts up until dark's last orgasmic gasp as
as meanwhile throughout the day and night snore the heavy-lidded
libraries, museums, symphony halls and college auditoriums
of Anytown USA hushed and tomblike as stout and sated cows?

Oh why be king or queen of any scuzzy illiterate American whoretowns with their elective artistic hysterectomies so overly-bled and sutured, so straining at their own adhesions until the next mad psychosurgery within the richest nation on earth daddied and diddled by an egoistic apeman so absent of soul that Jesus in thorns could descend into his boudoir waving neon crosses prophecying the beginning of the world and yet World War III or black gold would be too alluring for him or his hackneyed parishioners panting for say the next Wal-mart to sprout suddenly in their backyards like Aladdin-mansions, to be even vaguely interested in the compulsively obsessed-over kingdom of heaven proffered by some lesser deity? Oh, as if it means anything at all to be versed or florid or eloquent amidst the truculent travesty of a “culture” so reveling in ignorance and greed and lacking in first-hand knowledge with something as simple as a novel insight or idea, too jaded and spoiled to extract its head from its ignominious hole to recognize just one mote of genius?

No! Give me instead HELL, where all the bright lights lie, like Shelley, Keats, Byron, Thomas, Pound, Yeats, Sexton, Schwartz, Rilke, Ginsberg, Plath, Dante and all the rest who still blather like quote quote lunatics or at least freak phonetic fanatics consigned to the underworld for insistently blasting lucidity and truth straight onto the midbrain past thick foreheads of intransigent Neanderthal puppeteers and their grinning glass-eyed dummies, -- all those bituminous braindead bums ramrodding inane nationalistic and paternalistic bullshit sacks of utter dimwittery down tight throats unflexed yet acquiescent of such blowhard jobs, territorially manhandling, gunnysaking and penny shucking, hiccoughing hosannahs over shiny objects and electronic sheephead detritus, blaring enough iniquity to blot out each and every dancing star but never their hoarse and hoary voices constantly yammering and pontificating about anything and everything except what exactly might be meant by an “A” or a “B” or “C!”

copyright 03/08 julianza shavin