The Age of Dullards

O this age—this slack-jawed, sleep-walking, soul-starved age—
with its minds like mildewed barrels,
its imaginations shriveled like worms in winter clay,
its whole damned population dragging its belly across the asphalt
as if the sun of the spirit had gone out—
and indeed, it has, for them.

Bring them a poem—
a real poem, rich with the thick sap of the blood,
alive as a thunderbolt cracking the black breast of heaven—
and the swine sniff,
the swine snort,
the swine grunt in bored contempt,
seeking instead their sweet, sticky slop
poured forth from the troughs of their tiny, tinkling devices.

O the loathsome lot of them,
twitter-brained, twitch-eyed,
their attention fluttering and frittering in frantic fits,
their very souls reduced to a stuttering spark,
a dying ember,
a brief, greasy flicker in the windless void.

Yes—
offer them beauty,
the kind that strides naked from eternity,
muscle and flame,
dangerous as a god newly woken—
and they will smear their sneers across its face,
those malformed mouths of theirs
curling like the lips of curs who know no god
but their own glazed screens.

I hate them—
I truly, utterly loathe the lot of them—
these masses of meat without a mind,
these bodies without a breath of beyondness,
these crawling clots of human clutter
who have less imagination
than a worm writhing blindly in an apple’s heart.

Give the worm at least this praise:
it moves toward the core,
it hungers for the hidden sweetness,
it tunnels with a purpose.
But the modern mindless multitude?
Rot!
They stand stupefied, staring,
staring at the white glare of nothingness,
hungry for garbage,
glutted on garbage,
and still whining for more garbage.

O the damned degenerates—
the sodding rotters Lawrence cursed before me,
the sniveling sons of bitches
he longed to powder with insecticide—
yes!
they swarm still,
a pestilence of the pitiful,
a plague of pus-filled prattlers
dribbling day and night into the void of their phones.

And poetry—
that fierce, wing-flashing, vein-throbbing beast—
they would trap it,
trample it,
treat it as a tedious intruder,
not knowing the thing could tear their tin souls apart
and scatter the dust to the four furious winds.

I rage!
By God, I rage with the rage of the red earth
shaken by thunder below the roots.
I rage with the rage of the lion
chained and mocked by monkeys.
I rage with the rage of the fire
smothered by a midden heap of human mediocrity.

And still—
still!—
I thrust this long fierce line of words
like a spear into the flaccid belly of the age,
for poetry is not dead in itself,
only murdered in their sightless sight,
slain by their slack hearts
and their slavish devotion to the glittering void.

Let the worms inherit them.
Let the worms be their heirs—
for the worms at least are honest.
And let poetry live on in the deep places,
burning, brooding, beating,
waiting for the few—
the very few—
who still feel the fire
leaping like a god
from line to line.