Poetry Is Useless

There’s no point to doing this. No point
in cobbling breath, interest, and passion
until they congeal. I scrape stuff off plates
that matters more than this. Words

stopped having meaning years ago,
shortly before the advent of television,
shortly before the atom bomb made speech
irrelevant. Now that the planet itself

is boiling before our eyes, why bother with a poem
when a bullet between your brows will move you more?
There’s nothing a poem can do for you
a gun can’t do better.

Your love, your pain, your empathy and rage
make no difference to a tree that’s going to die.
Your heartbreak’s boring, your social conscience
means nothing — the world’s a dead issue, and the faster

humanity and all its conceits disappear, the better off
the world will be. You’d be better served making that happen
if you want a better planet, and forget immortality:
it’s pointless to write a poem when no one will be here to ignore it.

You’ll do it anyway, of course. You’ll do it anyway
because the clinical definition of insanity
is to do the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results.
Poets are humans, humans are insane. Welcome to the asylum:

enjoy it while you can.