POETRY
Anti-intellectual
Free verse
Perhaps dumbing language down
to banal dishwashing,
drugstore-shopping,
byte-sized commodities
is the poet’s new virtue
Perhaps it’s safer to bury intellect
and frame the world in simpleton prose
— mundane as parking lot gum —
in tableaus of Walmart customers
who dress as blandly as their
unimaginative expletives and slurs
Maybe it appears more ironic
to pluck the highbrow
with a rusty implement
and drag tetanus poetics
across a McDonald’s napkin
Anyway, who can compete with
the linguistic corrosion
of overused exclamations,
GIFs and memes —
they get to the quick of things
Let’s just spew sentences,
break them into rote verse,
forgoing Wordsworth
for cool, detached tropes
that project the lifelong ambition
of an early bird diner menu
Why reach for the stars
with poetics of the heart
when feeding another tweet
into the apathy metre will do?
Jessica Lee McMillan © 2021
