A very brilliant student remarked to me today
that there's constantly people dying and living
through death in my poems.
And, boy, was she right.
And it's just been thrown into sharper relief for me
every five seconds as I'm reading my poems today.
This is the last poem I'll read, it's the title poem from
my book Trébuchet.
These poems were written to land you on a government watch list.
And published at 1995 paperback, hardcover edition unreleased,
by an imposter of Faber and Faber,
of 320 South Jackson Street, Athens, inside a warehouse
formerly occupied by six Pinkerton deserters
in this year of our lord, 2016, the year
of the so-called accident.
Or maybe to throw a brick through the wall of the White
House and no note attached is their business.
These poems come pepper sprayed for your health
with dirty words, particularly on pages 3, 6, 23, 40, and 83.
And were written by one D. Schoonebeek,
an oftentimes troubled and defamatory young girl,
living among the worst generation of profiteers
in balaclavas.
And who somehow keeps herself violent through love.
Or maybe to start a riot inside the insurgents,
inside of the skirmish is their business.
Their weight is 9.356 ounces.
They will travel 732 feet in 12 seconds
when fired from a trebuchet.
Their burning temperature is still Fahrenheit 451.
And they were printed in these United States
by McNaughton and Gunn of Saline, Michigan.
Or maybe to smuggle the anthem back inside the chrysanthemum
is their business.
On the day of its publication, this book
would buy you four loaves rye peasant bread, eight white boot
laces, one liter of vodka filtered through cheesecloth,
five pounds goose feathers, zero theater tickets,
six single rides on Manhattan-bound bus lines,
three boxes baby diapers, 11 yards steel chain,
zero paintings, three cartons eggs, or a starred review
in Publishers Weekly.
What else do you expect for $19.95?
No, really.
What do you demand of your money?
What is the so-called function of police?
Their international standard book number is
9-780-820-3499-23.
And this is the same number of school shootings since 1986.
This is the same number of school shootings
since you were first broke.
This is the same number of school shootings
since you were last fucked.
This is the same number of school shootings
since you lost the use of your left.
This is the same number of school shootings
since the so-called accident.
This is the same number of school shootings
since Flight 370 vanished.
This is the same number of school shootings
since god said, I defect.
This is the same number of school shootings
since you laid down your weapons.
And these poems will offend a number
of people who will refuse to ignore them,
some of them people with what I like to call fathers.
Fathers in law, or fathers on Capitol Hill.
And I mean men and women of influence
with fathers of money in Iowa.
Their commercial potential is laughable.
The big five publishers will spend zero money printing
these poems, zero money ordering cured meat for the book party.
And the ruling class will read them,
but only on days when a family member is assassinated
or during nationally televised tragedies.
And they try to tell you the middle class is vanishing,
but the middle class will beat itself to death with this book.
The middle class will call this young girl
a woman of hatred of men.
The middle class will critique her.
The middle class will call her a national treasure.
The middle class will market her and the middle class
will interrogate her about her sex.
They say the middle class has vanished,
but it's the poor of this country who
should rear up and throw books of poetry
through the walls of the White House,
and no list of demands attached.
These poems are dedicated to no man or woman
who's yet been born.
To the slugs that will never leave your gun.
To milkmen, Miss Universe, snake oil salesman,
Russian volleyball champions, grave diggers,
bribed congressmen, waste managers, astronauts,
deserters, zookeepers, Mega Millions lottery winners,
knife collectors, ex-military tax evaders, careerists,
doomed politicians, musicologists.
Bread and butter men, buskers, anti-defamation lobbyists,
government shills, bad feminists, OK feminists,
slander enthusiasts, postal workers,
Wall Street propagandists, gun runners, unfamous poets,
sort of famous poets, advice columnists.
Javelin throwers, failed nuclear warhead designers,
beauty school dropouts, spam writers, cocktail artisans,
viola wunderkinds, Brazilian crust punks, mall cops,
secret servicemen, taxidermist, web hackers,
and hypnotherapist, stunt actors, card sharks,
and bible thumpers.
Porn stars, man children, fire eaters, lumberjacks,
bodyguards, and whistleblowers, and conspiracy theorists,
hijackers, children born without throats, and hung juries,
and hangmen, and whoever Death will not love.
If these poems don't throw themselves
through your windows, please burn them.
If you're the same person building himself
a ham sandwich inside his living room
after you've finished them, please
shoplift every edition of this book you can find.
Please tear out the pages, and please
burn them to warm your house through the winter.
The time of writing books that don't send us to jail is dead.
Drinking vinho verde under the harvest moon
and puttering our lines at each other is dead.
Asking yourself and asking yourself,
and why do you keep asking yourself
why a poem is the enemy of money, is dead.
If you will leave this book on a wood slab on a shelf
and gaping down into the world, please throw it on the floor
instead.
Or instead please, again, burn it.
Instead, fire it out of a trébuchet at the White House.
This book was written to terrify the fucking.
Like the last poems you read before the hostile takeover,
like the first lines you spoke when the plane disappeared.
This book was written to break the back of the saw horse
between you and the police.
It's a book like the Earth you might salt
if you started war against you.
Thank you.