Feature This

Someday I’ll be the featured poet

Not relegated to cattle calls but given top billing

Even though half the audience will bleed away at the break

Narcissistic preeners who have no interest in anyone who might shatter their self image

So good riddance

The crowd that stays knows quality when they hear it

See it

They’ll table thump and shout out the next line that they’ve learnt from Youtube

Where I’ve gone gangnam viral

I’ll let my words spill over the room like the best orgasm I’ve ever had

There’ll be a roomful of nodding heads

Mouths slackjawed open swallowing every word

While I let the stains soak into sheets of pure white paper

I’ll joke about the last award I never got

Or some festival in an exotic location like Drumheller

Where there was a festschrift to dinosaurs to die for

So I wrote an ode to albertasaurus that reanimated the fossilized remains

Thereby causing the death of a dozen poets and fans

At the point of a sharp toothed grin of a hungry Barney

Who was only penned in by a hundred rhyming couplets

Which refossilized the brute

Then I’d crack open another book and the words will self combust

Singing my lips as they burn ears

Carpet bombing the room with thoughts that might be the child

The child that Rumi would have had with Isadora Duncan

Living model homed on Tralfamadore

In another parallel universe

The next one over from the one where I’m the featured poet