Hello,
Thank you for the vote of confidence
I'm still not sure if I like poetry
so I asked a machine to bukowskify my text
but I didn't like it so I asked it to degipitify it
and to "Go Full Bukowski", whatever that means

And this is what came out of that machine
Now I"m certain it is quite gauche
to use a machine to do this

kind of like jacking off a dog in public
which is not something I've done,
except that one time

so without further adious

[OC] this ain't poetry. it's a hangover with punctuation.

are you really a poet
if your words wouldn’t make poe
drop his whiskey and say
“goddamn”?

what is poetry now, anyway?
some MFA brat
posting line breaks on instagram
in between latte selfies?

dead genre?
sure.
but the corpse still twitches
when the rent’s due
and no one's buying
your dumb zine about
"emotional topography."

maybe it’s just
whatever bullshit you spill
when somebody finally
lets you talk
and you don’t know when to shut up.

maybe it’s a flyer
for your marxist book club
written in lowercase
because you’re “disrupting form.”

does poetry need a point?
hell no.
but it needs teeth.
and most of it these days
is gumming the reader to death.

is there a line
between poetry
and a shitpost?
or just
the smugness
of the person who wrote it?

maybe poetry
used to stab you in the chest.
now it just
offers you tea
and asks how your inner child is doing.

i don’t know.
i don’t want my inner child.
he sucked.

when i picture a poet,
i see some
sad sack
in a scarf
talking to a cat
about how
love is like
a cigarette
but with more commitment issues.

banana
taped to the wall.
$120,000 price tag.
gallery full of rich people
nodding like they get it.
you don’t get it.
it’s not meant to be got.
it’s a scam
and poetry’s part of it.

is poetry a social construct?
sure.
so is traffic.
and i still get run over by both.

me?
i was told to take this seriously.
so i did.

i sat down,
put on the hat,
lit the cigarette,
and stared at the page
like it owed me money.

this is me
trying.

poetry in one hand.
beer in the other.
no answers.
just hoping
one of 'em
does something
before the bartender
cuts me off.

And of this entire thing,
this is the part that made me want to post it
I think even my detractors will admit it
it contains a lot of truth

when somebody finally
lets you talk  
and you don’t know when to shut up.