Popular Literature

 If you are going to write about your life
 You had better damn well have
 One hell of a kicking life.
 Take it from me, nobody cares
 That you hate your mother, or that
 Your father drank the family
 Into poverty, or what you saw
 Your sister doing with the neighbor boys.
 
 Everyone has a life, and everyone’s life
 At some point goes where it shouldn’t,
 Everyone’s life takes the left at Elm and Harcourt
 When it should have gone straight.
 
 You might connect with a few like-minded loonies
 Trying to work out their own dented pasts:
 Who desire the support, who come back
 Page after page like a shy boy
 Masturbating his way to adequacy.
 
 But if you want it to hold real
 Interest
 You had better have wings, or
 An exoskeleton, or have killed
 Your neighbors with a straightened
 Paper clip.  Someone needs
 To want to know about you.
 
 You want them to bypass all the pretty
 But useless poetry and settle
 On your every cluttered utterance,  
 Even themselves saying out loud,
 Why, that son-of-a-bitch sure had
 A tough staircase to climb:
 One of three arms tied behind his back
 And a halo following his sister about,
 With an eighty-five-pound lobster in the basement
 And a sparky neighbor who breathed obsidian.
 
 I wonder if he made it?