The Symbolic Affinities Between Poetry Blogs and Oil Wells

Reading you, Kent Johnson, the other day
announcing to the latest piece of neo-Dada,
posturing, flarfist ‘fake shit’ you’d been reading
that, no, what this stuff needed was not
an invitation to the MLA – death by MLA panel! –
but, ‘Geezus, Mary and Joseph’ and if only
for a change, to disappear down the nearest
toilet bowl, I thought of my own somewhat
submerged desire to be able to make poetry
out of the daily petty bêtises of PoBiz,
to write a sestina whose endwords would be
the names of six contemporary poets,
extract scabrous anagrams from the names
of the contributors to the Forward Book of Poetry,
or write a series of graphic atrocity poems about
not the war in Iraq or Afghanistan but a Patriot
missile crashing down on an anti-war poetry reading,
perhaps in the vein of some of those horrifyingly
hilarious poems in ‘Seven Submissions to the War
for The World’ from your Homage to the Last
Avant-Garde, a book everyone should read,
preferably in public, guffawing inappropriately,
at a funeral for instance or during a poetry reading,
and why aren’t poets on this side of the water
funny like you about PoBiz, or busy translating from
Greek poets like Alexandra Papaditsas who have
died ‘of the rare syndrome Cornuexcretis phalloides,
where a large kelatinous horn grows from the head’,
maybe Frank Kuppner does something similar
(you should read him and judge for yourself),
I don't know, and for the benefit of anyone
yet to have the pleasure of reading you
I will sign off (for it would appear to be lunch time)
with the closing lines of your ‘Baghdad’,
wishing you many more trouble-making comments
on Ron’s blog and Sylvia Beach letter finds
in obscure antique shops but most importantly
more of this kind of thing, in book form, soon, thanks:

Good night moon.
Good night poor people who shall inherit the moon.

Good night first editions of Das Kapital, Novum Organum,
The Symbolic Affinities between Poetry Blogs and Oil Wells,

and the Koran.

Good night nobody.

Good night Mr. Kent, good night, for now you must
soon wake up and rub your eyes and know that you are dead.