i still get two alumni magazines
shoved through my mailbox,
edinburgh's edit, and u.c.l.'s portico,
they're alike, they're asking for money:
which is a bit like that mystery of lawlessness,
one word... money!*

i love poetry, i really do,
i think it respects readers more
than those glutton chatterers of off-the-page prose,
there's no need to create characters,
prose readers have an easy way out,
they have all the hidden architecture
keeping them involved with time-wasting
effectively-exploitative narration,
and then the characters, off the page
nothing like the readers with mundane jobs,
with menial tasks better augmenting
the cartesian thought and being,
ego and something that represents a passing,
meaning the unit, re-, of something the same
that changes each day...
readers of poetry are not readers of prose,
in comparing poetry to prose
poetry is naked... there is no elaborate
scaffolding... to concrete character study...
a poet can't conjure characters...
he can't even conjure rivers or readers...
when prose has characters, poetry has readers;
how many memorable characters emerge
from a prosaic narrative? one, two... fifty?
you see the pawn legion fall on the first
shot shadow of mongolian arrows...
you see their slain bodies hit the mud without
a word... so you see:
poetry is too naked, it's a mud-hut compared
to prose's glass spiral...
poetry will leave you an architect, rather than
a labourer... you will build your own you...
i wish i too could build from scratch
a horizon of distractions...
i rather you build that... you can't be a character
for me... you have to be a reader... not necessarily
an orator of what i wrote... just a reader...
and more than all the summations of characters
can be moulded into... hence the loss of tightly packed
paragraphs... hence the scarcity of composition...
if prose be a Chopin or a Liszt... then poetry be a Debussy or
a Satie... and i prefer the latter...
plus poetry is written so there's less eye-strain
bothering you... no loss of post-interlude starting point...
when poetry is read standing up...
prose is a style taken to bed and falling asleep to,
or that easy armchair: when i was converting my
grandmother to read poetry (zbigniew herbert's)
and forget the cheap romance novels... she was quietly
amused... i told her we write scarce words, once in a while,
rather than attempting to procrastinate
as most work is these days with the lost scythe and plough
on the pseudo-faustian bargain of Proust
(if it has no direct meaning, remember
there's a direct and an indirect article dualism,
just let it resound... don't treat it like a comet...
but more like rainfall... i treat ezra pound's like that...
like a hundred people could say the same,
even though only one did)...
the proustian bargain fabble? babble babble blah blah
babylon... the israelites sung about the babylonian
captivity... thought about the egyptian one...
i once said architectural necrophilia, and i'm true to it
like an expected tide...
but let us return to the title...
poetics explains economics the best...
new notation in post-existentialism, the ditto-encapsulation
will be replaced with a non-literary notation,
with the approx. mark, so a word is referred to
as approximately rather than within the skeleton
of ambiguity, loose the question mark, that way you will,
no longer "haiku" as referring to syllables, but rather
referring to length, hence the notation ~haiku, e.g.:
poet strip yourself of priceless / worthless subject matters,
the mechanics of the moon and the sun are too much,
you write of beauty for beauty be only a grandeur,
and indeed you take pick of the celestial bodies,
but you leave the two-pence coin on the pavement
when you pass it, and by not picking it up
not blowing on it for good luck (come one moment
come the next moment, gone),
so that the pennies can be increased...
write a thousand moons into a single poem
and still the thousand moons will not translate
into a thousand pounds: you speak of the nocturnal
moisture with a mouth of a desert, and a tongue
like a sidewinder... always missing the topic
you care for because you have never took step
on the object stressed, used...
don't make this a barren art-form.