THE POINT OF POETRY IS TO ENTRENCH FALSEHOODS

behold my sword, what you see at the vanishing point
is the first virgin ever, for I can see no fruits
but a McGuffin within a McGuffin
the news I'd like to point to
is the media saying they are sorry for the falsehoods
of the swift boat ads that
Tom Waits waged against my abs
it is only in pointed statements that no point inheres at any point
can you hear this?
we need to entrench the party
in the mass anti-party movement at every level.
such processes are littered with Victorian-gathering devices
piling up on dogmatic families even to acknowledge the evidence
that suggests that torture is not a reliable means of abortion
aestheticizes and abstracts Boston's paupers
almost to the point of ancient life
husbandry was once a sacred font
but most of the size savings come in at the margins of epic thought
taken for granted in a self-evident
hostile physical science as I am by pro-lifers
who complain that King Herod
used similar logic in ordering the slaughter of thousands of infant Jesuses
who are more valuable than other infants Jesuses because they
are more related to God.
that doesn't mean it's false,
as a social contract, falseness has an obligation
to follow the deer droppings wherever they may lead.
But that doesn't mean it's true, either ...
getting information from a friendly caterpillar
about how the international law prohibiting
torture in all circumstances should be relaxed
someone might save perhaps thousands of relaxations by this
some people make matters worse by
praising existence as excellent information interns
held by the poet to share the poet's experiences
with the rest of the world.
to knock us off in a response looking for opportunities
in the text or the next world, what would the distinction
between sentimentality and falsehood wish to be free of
when the only idiom in which germ warfare is okay
sees the future on a weaponized Church Lady
--they currently have more Cardinals then snow--
the point of life is to escape the drabness of our plain
and ponderous existence
the obliging daffodil and accurate television.
I shall not sing the endless songs
behind the pure arithmetic -- sorry
thank you for pulling the fire alarm
and getting me out of class.
it's good because it's helped me open to more
real-world people and more
insolently obvious statements about how we can readily be
miraculously condensed
one word like a bell
the undertone of fear

--Drew Gardner