Usually, it would be that a post of gratitude for the poems posted ought perhaps to thank readers who ‘sign’ their evidence of having witnessed such work by ‘likes,’ and also establish the fact of their passive complicity in non-support by so doing.
That would include the fact that there were some who had purchased the book from which those readers ‘liked’ the book.
Apparently, the royal readers feel no such compunction as to showing any kind of appreciation that is not first understood as a distinct requirement that they come first; and only secondarily should there be any possibility that a book, even a physical copy for under $2.00 or an e-book similarly, be considered.
After all, they also are writers and readers of ambition and to stop to purchase might negate the competitive stance they hold whereby they should possibly be given such things as actual books, but in
their magnanimity they will settle for freely published/posted poems as a sufferance.
That they take no small pleasure in allowing corporate determination of literary values by such acts which remain seeming passive is beyond their understanding.
Fuck you, they don’t say – if you disappear under such lack of acknowledgment, such continued refusal to show real appreciative support, we do not care: there are more of us than you; and besides, they whisper to themselves each, I am sure I shall be The One who remains, Learned and Engaged.
Eventually these cannibals endure a quiet defeat they pretend to not comprehend, puzzled over the corporate world’s domination of whom is even allowed to speak deriving from the shuffling lack of significance fixed by their own passive deceit in creating the situation they tell themselves they deplore.
Baa, they say. Baa to any argument that would result in physical change, exactly, mirabile dictu, the poet was real, and not keeping his place. Just as if he or she thought they were as great as the classic free works.
Violent sheep to the core playing shadow games against their own engineered defeat and
ultimate disappearance.
All apparent energy of such slaves in determining standards never fixed because never shown real support, now dismissed as they await another attempt to be realized by somebody else, their masticating as it ever was: toothless, labored over with foul breath, and suspect motives.
A foul swamp of a kingdom declaring itself paradise, and its unclothed peasants campfire gathered as enthroned royalty awaiting another whom they can perfectly ignore and declaim their abandonment as real, and undeserving.
Eager as they anticipate news events, Tv programming, and all manner of gossip on which to speculate and then classify as art, poetry and superior understanding.
Oh, the humanity you can hear one declaim, as this dirigible sinks in flames.
Or better yet, listen to the silence all you Jethro Bodines: that is the sound of your culture.
©Dean Baker
OUR GEOGRAPHIES, POEMS VOL.2, 126 pages
paperback https://www.amazon.com/Our-Geographies-Poems-1970-1980-2/dp/1502915596 $1.78
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https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08ZJLWZ13 The New Poetry Hotel
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