SWIPE RIGHT
No point harassing the Niceday highlighter.
The busted bust of Palas in the palace, alas,
Is all the marbles you get in Poetrydom,
More or less. Poetry tends to get, fast,
Unfriended, in this pacey age of sub/dom.
My poetry job ended at half-time, ushered
Out with the blinded majorettes (pom-poms,
Falling). What remains on the field are
Meatheads bulleting each other’s hurtlocker
Torsos. Ever rooted for a side you shouldn’t
Have, mate? Taliban verse was reviewed
I gather. Favourably? Not sure.
Music is, to them, over-rated, while drones
Rake down. Wake me before you drown-drown.
My partner joined a LGBTQ
Group at her investment bank to be inclusive;
Or rather, more inclusive. I felt a cold shoulder
At the wheel of corporate ownership.
I remain impossibly pre-facebook, queer,
But never more bisexualist than Tiresias.
Money, meanwhile, is comfortable eyeless,
Communes with fags, hags, and stags,
So long as they hold moneybags between
Their legs. History ended again yesterday
When we made peace with Iran. We now means
China too. I waited my whole middle youth
For Pixies to release new material and when
They do, no Deal. Poetry is a gang of thugs
Unable to move units at WH Smith,
Whose verbal skills, like Toby Jugs, shape
National mirth in streams of urinal force.
Thus, when one drinks a poet’s piss, we really
Toast healthier sales of all the horsecrap prose
Our novelist friends managed to e-book.
I learned around an oak table at school
That spanking fiction pays if the wood is birch.
The greatest living poet in our tongue is Hill.
I too take the occasional pill. My soul is ill.
It sobs like a fat man at a slim WC door.
My voice broke last week, the same time
As my will to compete with the love brigade.
That’s the arseholes with keyboards, iPhones.
Having sold my soul at the demonic crossroads
To Harold Bloom, I should have swerved
To celebrity, but he said, look, lack
Is what poesis ravenously adores to crave,
Feed on what you don’t get paid. Again.
Poesis is how you don’t get made a man
By picking up a pen, friend, in this mean town.
The canon, he informed me as only he can
In Latin, Greek, Hebrew and gobbledygook,
Knows that for the bard, being ranked A-list
Is like being sun-kissed with wax wings.
Avoid being classed too high, drowsy,
Drugged or straight edge. Compose
Yourself on a thin ledge, and don’t jump
When your many followers invite you to fist
The ferro-concrete floor with brain matter.
In short, don’t die when the Commander-
In-chief says take them, take them all
And out of the sky falling like Tennyson hawks
Or falcons or eagles, crooked out of some
Droning hook of fate, meaning clashes
Cymbals, to detonate a small meeting of things
That might normally not have met, like bodies
And fire, ice and wire, weddings and hate.
The resulting shit smear is drain of life incarnate
Delivered from the man who claimed to be good,
Which is just the way they talk in the neighbourhood.
I bend to pick up old women, and pieces of their
Old men. I am stooped with a rushing loss
Of faith such as blood streaming from
An artery might appear to be. My
Belief in faith is at a total low ebb.
These wedding shrouds that are my eyeballs
Offer as a timely gift obliteration’s
Pall, a purple answer to shade
When arterial spillage is waste.
Taste demands we pay victims of a quake.
I swipe right to slake my desire
To kiss every face I can see on my screen
For free, or if they give A service, a hundred.
Don’t dread the ban on the dark net,
Margins peddle images out of Spiritus Mundi,
All those in Westminster Abbey
Rise to bow. Nevermore lick any firm's helmet
Of flesh or blood. My dick a platinum catalyst
And the rest is fusion, confused as history.
NEW POEM BY TODD SWIFT; COPYRIGHT 2013
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