SHARKPACK Poetry Review

A rapping at the door with fist’s rhythm——or worse, with a knocker. Lève la tête and open. Aha, it’s a Poem Written by University Poet, ‘text’ by #OFTEHMINUTEPOET, Poet Avec Blurb by Patti Smith——you know, it’s a finalist for everything straightaway; it’s Mr Expletive Means I’m Mad, Mr Speaking-My-Rough-Life, hihi Mz It’s-not-exotification-when-I-do-it, it’s Refer-to-me-as-Them-before-Reading-me, it’s Marvel’s Mystique as RT holding a box of darkness, it’s OHMYBLUECOLLAR & OHOHMYVERNACULAR, it’s Colonialism-is-Anti-Colonial-in-my-case, it is Gay Enough and Lyrical, it’s MyBio, it is Feminism’s-Pissing-Outdoors, it’s Self-Loathing White Guy, wellhello! Is it a poem or a person? Few poems survive these days without their owners trotting behind. Wellhello tedious caller + your ventilator-poem with the querulous mask.

I see tedious caller that your pet reflects back at Me the Reader precisely the companion-thought I intuit after a few years of emotive socialization + shaming tepid writingprogram litbiz emboldenment——ohhhhhh / that empty box can teach me something? Ohhhhh everything is an orchid so nice. Ohhhhh saying dick is brutchic and that’s in me too. Gets it? All I needed from you TC was to outfit this pet in a new pair of slacks. Cornflower! A pair of cornflower slacks on a pet I’ve already summarized is just elevating enough. It’s coming out from the sauna to see I really like grenache or finally ready to admit we met on Grindr SO WHAT. Let’s Slim Realization! Let’s polish the sliver silverer / polish off the malt liquor. Gets it.

Alongside this lunch the abominable melting jay. From the wire jay reads its reach in playloop of It Follows——playloop on the lake, How. If jay aspires to be a poet she’ll triple-issue, her wraiths will likely become enemy swans or rakes, she’ll never speak for them. The poems appear pissing themselves maybe, lipstick smeared, beak twisted, nude and looming on a rooftop, black-eyed at the shed door. When it appears, the poem is menacing—glowering or simpering but blankly assertive, guiseless, peddling nothing, alien——though jay knows roughly which limb will hang where. The primary concern of Poem is becoming Itself, dire, inchoate, roiling, syntagm, fail, glitchy expanse——Itself-as-work without worldly kindly kindly-angry aspiration——as moving unclean earth. Peut-être just the worms in it move. These poems never owe zygote to leveraging having-lived or having-suffered. They lift a head of hair invisibly. When struck by a chair the Poems respond with concussive reprisal——not for anger, no, but as expelling recompense for even a moment’s acquaintance with the disgusting denuded willowy objects TC calls Personal Populace, his Stuff, his unmutated Trials. These hag-relics the Poems walk ponderously, wearing their flesh, monstrous nameless excess. A mugging Gorgon with no verso. Plaudits cannot tame them. One runs from such a loathsome beanpole in Bombay only to find it shapely and lumbering as a toad in Blois. A lovely encounter! Like a placard meeting glass.

Joseph Spece