PARANOIA Poem by Leonard Nolens

They say that poets should keep their tongue in check.
They, they are the fashion journalists who slate my clothes
And tomorrow wear my designs. They are the kitchen inspectors
Who sup on my flesh and spit in my pans.
They are the weed killers and dead doctors of poetry.
But who has clothed the naked and fed the hungry ?

No, the tongue you have stained on your slides is also mine
And what you is actually pretty pathetic.
Your metrical jackets and rhyming britches, count me out.
Your salt-free sonnet snapshots, excuse me, no, merci.

I can't help it, the sublimest prosody
Comes from the guts, ultimately every soul thinks intestinally
(Unlike my capital letter, here she comes :
She is the C clef of my horizontal staves.)

Perhaps this charms or startles. It wasn't meant to.
Many of these lines are hammered together with malice and hate.
Even with good intentions, my road leads to hell.
If you suffer you go to hell, there's no percentage in pain.

Words, seed and cents were made to spend freely.
Never put them in the savings book of the evident form.
The deepest form is in the fellow's rhythm poetry
With balls, therefore, as Pavese said, and he gulped his death.