Natural Selection
Renegade Oddities, №3
I never gave a damn
about poetry
before Bukowski,
and
I didn’t know a thing
about Bukowski
a year ago.
You’d think that
a segue into
a poem
about
newfound love —
a love letter
penned at the tail end
of a prose-free
honeymoon —
you’d be wrong.
This one’s
no lovechild.
This one’s
a loveless bastard
penned out of wedlock.
This one’s a confession;
an admission of
fearfulness and insecurity;
an attempt to face
the spectre
nagging me at
every stanza.
“Why?”
It never stops.
“WHY WHY WHY
WHY WHY WHY
WHY WHY WHY
WHY WHY WHY
WHY WHY WHY
WHY WHY WHY
WHY WHY WHY
WHY WHY WHY
WHY WHY WHY.”
It never stops.
As if I knew.
As if I had a fucking answer.
As if I could tell
whether I
fell in love with poetry
hard enough
to abandon
prose,
or
if
poetry
is the way I
cope, and deny
that I’ve damaged myself
too badly
to compose
a single
girthy paperback
with
at least one essay
Hitchens
might’ve noticed
within its pages.
I used
to wonder
how
Nietzche
ever managed
to churn out
his every master piece.
These days,
I wonder
how
the last of his sanity
managed to hang
on a typewriter alone
for as long as it did.
I suppose it doesn’t matter.
“Survival of the fittest”
never implied
survival of the strongest;
the “fittest” are
merely those
with at least one excuse
to trudge through another day.
