I read an african woman poet and shudder

what dreadful poetry, I think

how unpleasant

and how different it is

to be terrified by good poetry

good poetry is full of life’s sweat

and death’s piss

it is an electrical switchboard

where contracting blood vessels

pulse visibly

as though suffering a humiliation

          the tar is already bubbling

          soon they will stick your finger into it,

          philistine,

          yes, yes, you must fear good poetry

          because, you see, people don’t

          just fly to Bali

          and lick ice cream

          they also lick wounds

          children don’t just sniff flowers

          but also sniff glue

          they sleep not only in beds,

          but also between two mounds of earth,

          on one side mama, on the other – papa

good poetry participates in orgies

thrashes around, all worked up,

with various incarnations, with natural phenomenons,

lightning, for example

just imagine poetry and lightning coming together…

of course also with birds, plants,

the whole kingdom of fungi,

ghosts, lizards, mammals

but she is not fond of groomed purebreds

she likes the dishevelled, crooked mixed breeds

all crooked forms are beloved to good poetry

because just try and confine it to any trigonometry

or Ark of the Covenant –

the curse word has not yet been invented

that she will invoke to explode

any walls closing in around her

good poetry gives life to some and death to others

to some she is goddess, to others, the reaper –

a toothed gap of some sort

that you always think you can squeeze through but inevitably leaves you

bloodie

          the tuvans drown in alcohol

          the indians are confined to reservations

          whales swallow plastic and weep in the oceans

          the tropics bleed palm oil

          for orangutans to wade through –

          today’s most melancholy of poets

poetry belongs to literature

and what is literature but a lifetime of DNA

all that cosmic dust,

underground bio archives

and epigenetic tricks

she is not competent, will pull the exemption card in a heartbeat

she is colossal against the law

no one can detain her or sentence her to death

prisons are but castles made of sand,

firing squads—but tin soldiers

she cannot even kill herself

and if she tries immediately falls pregnant

with anything that might try to harm her

people often try to hide from good poetry

from bad – not so much

one is an uninvited boogey-man, covered in liverwort

the other a wounded comforter, appearing only when called

and there is nothing more terrible

than the resuscitation of bad poetry

it makes even the most harmless demons horrible

and thus even the most horrible demons of good poetry

are downright angelic

companions with whom you can rage into the night

and dive into the abyss

spectres burst from this energy

bloom and die continually

and in death

pass on to you

the most fragile of the world’s light