(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 12, 2014)


Can poetry survive? Can we survive as poets?
There are more poets than tigers or black rhinos.
There are more readers of verse than Leatherback Turtles
or all of the Yangtze Finless Porpoise.

Grand Theft Auto, Strive-and-Thrive books,
Brave-New-World movie rentals—
they may have taken over living room pleasures.
But now with our tweets and submittables,

our bad poems travel fast.
The wires and workshops are still full of weedy thinkers
and word-tinkers. Maybe the distribution will change
and who makes the money, like the printing press

set the monks to the curb. The medium was always unstable.
As soon as an invention is born, it begins to die.
Don’t put all your eggs in one anthology.
Speaking of which, we’re not as big as a chicken-

processing lobby, nor our players as emboldened
as enthusiasts visiting Comic-Con. But we’re full of deviance
and underground custom, perfectly respectable as a cult:
religious, novel, obsessively durable.