This poem is meant to be read aloud
to a drunk audience, too broke
to spring for cab fare home.
I am telling you this before you sit down
beside a quiet evening
for a fireplace with your hot cocoa, spectacles, and poetry,
so that you do not grab this poem
inadvertently and read as if the world hinged
upon a misplaced red oil barrow.

[Pause for the drunks to laugh]

Seriously, folks. Poetry is best read
as stand-up comedy. Four-hundred years ago, yes,
there was something poetic to write about,
but now, you have two choices:
1) Write about the same things they thought beautiful.
2) Try to make a postmodern world seem beautiful.
In other words, a poet
is either a sleep therapist,
or a comic.

I am here to save the world through comedy.

What the world needs is the type of poem
written on the unused portions of bar napkins—
a phone number that you will never dial,
or a pickup line guaranteed for at least four slaps.
It needs the type of poetry that ambushes you
from behind an expired milk carton;
the type that introduces a Calculus-wielding
penguin just as your dream about a topless
grocery store in Portugal gets good;
the type so raw, you could throw
it in a stew and boil;
so real, that it is said once, and forgotten.

It needs the type of poem, that if written
for a class at Cornell, would solicit the deadpan,
"Well at least you didn't allude to Eliot."
That would then, against the solemnity
of a classroom awed by the abuse poetry must suffer,
summon inquiries into the nature
of the red oil barrow,
or regarding at whom the drunks are truly laughing.
The type of poem that would then provoke
enough courage to yell, "You, they're laughing at you!"
as you leap over the professor's desk
on your flight out the window.

In other words,
the type of poetry that must never be written.