Imagining literary strawmen 

Guy in your MFA style poetry

Shark's Skin

Cascading silhouettes, spectre and their shadows 

Crashing onto the stage, high contrast blizzard

(is there any other type?)

Returning for reconciliation of forgetfulness

Material Recovery 

(as if it can be taken back)

Slips pinned to walls by errant drafts

Unsuccessful at the beautiful pursuit of ignorant cover

(the paradox of shocked eyes)

Only then does it realise the horror

Of its calloused, shark’s skin.


Girl in your MFA who complains about guy in your MFA style poetry 

Mother, I promised 

To get the marmalade, from kroger

or maybe its a fred & meyers

quite frankly im not really sure

But the image of man stopped me

dead in my

tracks

and I no longer had the courage

to engage in the material pursuit

of that sticky

orange 

awful 

thing


hipster writing overly serious passages about drug use


Lilies fluttering delicately in the wild, some organic gymnopedie, a playful dance of virgin white. Below. Grass beaming with excess, colored an unfortunate green by the generosity of spring. Below. Worms and their suitors inching through the ground, burrows and tunnels, the perpetual construction of the bowels of the earth. Below. Basalt, Granite. Below. Magma. Below. An individual, on an axis with a strikingly beautiful scene, and yet completely removed, cast away from the freedom which lies above, or beneath as it were, to enter his frame.  A ravaged man, oxlike eyes, stolen from an Athens whore. A lepers skin, pockmarked for a child's amusement, ripe for constellation. Sitting cross legged, as if performing an asiatic ritual. He waits, the weight of it all pressing down upon his shoulders. The lilies’s ball, the verdant grass, lives within dirt- all oblivious to his solitary vigil in hallowed space beneath the earth's lambent skin. Eyes remain resolutely closed, funereally sealed as he surrenders to descent. Memories shed like snakeskin slough off one by one. A Hydra harvest of former selves pruned away until only the child remains. He waits eternal, wedded to the womb from whence all issues forth, until the world exhales its final gasp and is subsumed again into primeval diffused nebulae. Only then does he emerge, newly smelted into that singular unsundered thing. Or so he believes, golden nectar eroding keyholes such that the glorious light of divination might shine through craggy, calcified dermis.