It’s been six months
since David S. Buckel
lit his own fuse, and Brooklyn
seems already to have forgotten.
You’re gonna have to look up
his name, aren’t you? Like you
would have to Google the infamous
Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi,
whom Aeneas saw in the underworld.
No spring for Brooklyn.
Even flesh-burningly large
acts of resistance wither
with time. What use then
is the fight, is writing a poem
in a world where poetry
loses to Netflix every night
because poetry can’t hit
your dopamine receptors
quite like a miniseries can?
because poetry can’t fuck good?
What if it could compete?
Imagine this piece just smacking
the headboard, and I’ve successfully
aroused you to action, to quit
your job, convinced myself to quit
my own, to wrap a bandana
around my face, to deface
the skyscrapers of this city,
to unfurl from a roof a banner
that declares meaningful truth,
to blow a whistle so loud I pierce
the corporate eardrum, to rig
the system in the interest
of longitudinal humanity
and the environment.
Can I do that? without lighter fluid?
Is that even the point?
Imagine you binge this onslaught
of peak, golden-age, single-use poetry,
that it can be so easy,
that it doesn’t tire you out
even on these Palinurus nights
when you fight off sleep
for just one more verse and the book
asks you ‘are you still reading?’
because poetry tracks your
levels of engagement.
Imagine you don’t have to pay
close attention, that it can refresh
you, that it can wash over you
like last night’s Grey’s Anatomy,
and you forget it wormed inside
your brain until someone shakes you
by your shoulder and says,
“Oh my god, did you read…?”
and you cover your heart and say,
“Oh my god, so good!”
And that’s the extent of it.
What if that’s the point of a poem?
What if that’s the goal
for a writer to have achieved.
That’s a life oh my god so good.
He lit himself on fire
in a public park because
he could not adequately
change the dire course
of the climate, and he proved
that he had accurately assessed
his inability to influence.
We teach our kids to aspire
to change the world
and their inevitable failure
will not be their fault.
I was built to keep writing,
to keep fucking real good,
whatever that amounts to,
to scream at the mountains,
to keep swimming upstream
despite my no upper body strength,
despite the current interminable
that douses everyone’s fire.
I don’t know what else to do
besides rewatch all nine seasons
of the original ‘80s version
of Dynasty on Amazon Prime
and holy shit you guys… so good.