i am an imitation. 

[‘So poetic imitation is no longer considered mimicry, but is regarded as an act of imaginative creation by which the poet, drawing his material from the phenomenal world, makes something new out of it.’]

i see beautiful people in the street, with messy mangled wild hair and old, baggy clothes that fall on their frame like thin silk drapes thrown on grandma’s loveseat, and i say: ‘damn. i oughta try that’ & get a cold perm & realize how much better my money is spent at goodwill. 

[‘The poet imitates not the surface of things but the reality embedded within.’]

then there’s a voice that would make one lovely spoken poet, sometimes even if their words were meaningless, or jumbled and trashed but with meaning. imagine hearing a prayer from those lips, as a god. maybe that’d be dangerous, maybe you’d want’a hear them beg, just to take in their sound. so i pray that my voice may sound so sweet, hardly thinking of the punishment i’d receive. i beg too, yes, but not so beautifully. 

then there are the dead ones. they’ve got no physical life, and yet their photos, words, worlds, and even audio taped whims still exist on this sack. so through that they seem perfectly, wholly alive & breathing better than i. they scare me the most, though, cause even as a non spiritual i feel them when i read their works or hear their voice, and i dread to think that maybe they could see me acting like a fool in my small, messy room and i feel embarrassed. i want a life like those dead ones. maybe not in the sense that i’m six feet under or on someone’s proper mantle, or in some storage unit in the midwest, but to have a life so memorable, so immortal as theirs. and not in the fame sense, either: just a life that i can finally remember. not like this one, where i can’t remember what happened yesterday or during my entire childhood. 

[According to Aristotle’s theory, moral qualities, characteristics, the permanent temper of the mind, the temporary emotions and feelings, are all action and so objects of poetic imitation.]

Quotes from the ‘Basics of Literary Criticism,’ Dr. Vilas Salunke.

hey there, old mirror laced with dim golden baroque rhythms on your sides.. 

ask me a question, i promise to answer it well in your bar tonight !

—and off he spins like a hippie in john’s meadow

to beat his breast with brandy. 

the scene’s alright:

the air gently suffocates newcomers

with her afterhour pollution

of tight held hands,

tipsy promises

(forgotten two sips later),

crippled thighs and dripping taps,

dragged even further by a drunk blissful beggar dreaming for a mirror’s q.

hey there, old mirror—

how’s my question, doll ?

her frame drags heavy on the barmaid’s nail as ceiling fans shake her dust,

an’ oh so eager to drop the drunk,

over she coaxes a honeyed boy

with eyelids weighed by hours of Manhattan worship 

clutching lipstick from his rebound’s bag tight in his shaking hand,

possessing a reflection unseen by any in her booze-blind glare. 

impatient,

matte rose paints chalky on the dust-covered glass,

& from that babe’s shaking hand, cursive ragged and his breath just as bad,

comes the hungover mirror’s question:

do you fear life without delusion ?

lungs dissolving to pink mormon chalk, liver poor as the hudson

our drunkard screams:

of course, old crack ! 

it is by her— a terrifying imagination—

that i survive.