The college kids still pump out poems; my heroes haven't published a book in years. The academics are moving to visual arts kerning letters on the page, adding artist statements.
Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.
Passion fades with age, I suppose. A symptom of the cult of happiness.
And I love to read poems from twenty-somethings who just want to get ******. I picture my red pen exciting them as I destroy their fine-tuned metaphors, all muddled with conflicting allusion, as if juxtaposition alone adds meaning.
In school, it was all Cezanne and hydrogen jukebox birdsongs, and equally interesting but useless adjective strings. The academics are doing the same, but with form. It bores us, don't they know?
Fuego en juventud. Sabiduría en viejo.
**** these kids for having such easy means to publication. I read their journals, their magazines, their "editions" online, vivid, vomiting color and opinion.
I long for publishing classified ads and scribbled chalk portraits of the women I loved and the twenty-somethings who just wanted to get ******, and reflections of how I never mastered either craft.
I long to rub the ink off newsprint in my fingers, smudge the words on the page and ***** my hands, watch the chalk run into the red brick during ten-minute monsoons, smell the library's adobe, light a cigarette and remember that the stacks are filled with ages of greater work than these ******* kids... and these ******* academics.