James Joyce Is A Dead Lesbian

Sit here listening to Dead Lesbian

And the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters

Letting their Electric Mayhem crash in my head

It’s a pounding drug trip shearing through

My poor defenseless mind.

Ta Dah! Does this poem really have anything behind it?

If I capitalize it in the right spots and make it as random as it can get, do I get to be called brilliant and innovative?

Or am I

Just another

E.

E.

Cummingswannabe?

When PoEmS EaSy To WrItE aNd EaSy To Be CoNgRaTuLaTeD

When the art form is Dead (Lesbian and Fibrillating Scissor Sisters)

When I think that maybe we should just skip poetry and focus

When on the short stories, because there’s always something to be made when

When we’re not just trying to be stylistic.

It’s a little like James Joyce when you think about it “If I don’t get it,” says clever critic, “it must be inspired.”

“Genius.”

“Tremendous”

“Greatest work of literature ever.”

“Fu-Sneeze-ing pornography.”

Of course then you get things like Finnegan’s Wake which has those completely meaningless not-words and a not-plot and have you noticed that this is kind of like that punctuation-less ending of Ulysses hey that’s by James Joyce too what a plagiarism I am and it’s like Molly Bloom and yes I said yes I will Yes oh damn I don’t even like James Joyce I have twenty-four hours to get rid of this bozo and you are WEARING HIS MERCHANDISE just another random reference from Hercules you remember that Disney movie I had always liked Pegasus and the freezing titan of course if I were a real poet I wouldn’t have told you where the reference came from because that just sort of makes it unprofessional and God forbid like other people’s right

And of course, there’s the emo poem.

Slit my wrists! Cut my throoooat!

God I wish my life would just fu-sneeze-ing end!

I hate it all but I’m too cowardly to pull it off.

Don’t make fun of me too much, please?

And then there’s the Iliad and Odyssey and the Nibelungenlied

The epic poems of long ago which are truly classics

You know I’m doing the Nibelunglied for a project in school, right?

But that’s beside the point.

So is the fact that one of my favorite Iliad characters is Antilokhos, I was sad when I found out he died.

But I digress, I’m rambling.

Oh, that’s right, that’s art.

God is dead; thus spoke Zarathustra. Art is dead; thus spoke Tim Baumann.