There Are No Preestablished Rules to Determine Criteria For the Creation of Poetry

THERE ARE NO PREESTABLISHED RULES
TO DETERMINE CRITERIA FOR THE CREATION
OF POETRY. JUDGMENT OF THE VALUE AND MERIT
OF A POEM IS MERELY A SELF-INDULGENCE
IN BLIND EGOTISM


Lava and ashes, red and blacks, were brought
Into the den
By a remote camera and a nearby screen.
So the unevenness of the evening
Became a Hula dance of light effects.

A professor who looked like an allegory
of chaos done by Bernini on commission from
Cardinal Borghese and Michelangelo's Moses
who already had broken the tablets,
And now was dripping gin from lips
after sipping from the tits of a golden cow
whose batteries generated a "Moo,"
and then erased the sound
To send out a bark into the noise
of conversations
And of a man who in the corner behind
a potted palms who was reading aloud
the constitution.

"Let us remember that circa 33 AD Paul
Was converted. Michelangelo painted
A galloping white horse as beautiful
As an apple tree in bloom, "
Spoke the hostess who stunned
with her hegemony.

The poets present were pasting words
Freshly cut from dictionaries and still alive
Over the mouths of vases and watching
The words wilt and become skulls.

A philosopher was doing subtractions
To substantiate with marks on parchment
A sense of loss.
He switched to a discussion
Of art, elaborated on saying the unsayable,
Verifying the unverifiable. His last words
Before passing from over-indulgence
In orange juice and vodka
were that all speech
Was the struggle to say
what cannot be said.


"We must remember two teachers, Simon
And Cleobius, among the Corinthians taught
The invalidity of the Old Testament prophets,
The God the consensus accepted was not
The true God, a mistake
of an unknown material
Created the world, Jesus was an apparition
And a metaphor, never a physical man,"
The hostess with a charming motion of
Her lower arm, remarked to a portrait
Of an ancestor on the wall.

The lava red with flashing lights
of vermilion
Was now flowing over the gray lava
from the previous
E-
Ruption.
The scene was a background for
a pornography movie
In which visual metaphors for coition were
The turning of a water well,
the turning of a spinning wheel,
The turning of the wheel of Fortuna,
the large tires of a race car going
three-hundred miles an hour,
The legs of a greyhound in motion
as the greyhound
Chased a mechanical rabbit.

After a long discussion,
moderated by the hostess,
Now disrobed so the false appearance
of clothes
Would not distort the truth,
about how only the
Freeing of the artists from the community
and
The language of lies that people speak
constantly
In their daily lives will open the artist
to achieve through
A counterforce the somewhat diminishing
Of the evils of the community
and their traditional values.
The artists must not oppose,
but surmount and overlook the community
and their banal narratives
That destroy truth and the values
of genuine life.
Above all, all those poets who due to their
Greedy opportunist appropriated Carl Jung
And diluted his views
for popular consumption
Must be abolished from the Republic. Book
Ten of Plato's Republic was cited.

The discussion was long
and all alcoholic drinks
Had been consumed and the floor was piled
With empty bottles, the poets all decided
To conclude the discussion
with the resolution
That nothing could be concluded, and
All, including the naked hostess, sat down
To play Bingo.


Duane Locke

Posted over on Seeker Magazine