Bullying success against sensitive failure.
The poet urged himself to kill.
“Poets are afraid to harm. But I will.”
The sly reversing of the formula took time,
but not that much time, at all.
Do you know dictators secretly think of themselves as poets?
In their breasts, moving anthems are sung?
A manifesto, or two, was all it took. A charismatic figure who mocked. Poets, like dictators, fall.
Now poetry began to be hurtful. Cement and oil
replaced rhymes and all of those things
for which poets ordinarily toil.