Saturday, 22 February 2014

What to do when a Poet Uses the Word “Desolate” Too Many Times


Poets have suddenly sprung out of the earth everywhere, like one of those American towns where annoying chripy crickets emerge every 17 years in order to eat all the leaves, and leave dessicated insectoid corpses rotting all over the ground for months afterwards.

Poets are hard to avoid. A truly dedicated poet can insist on trying to make you read their latest work in any social situation, and if you claim you are awaiting a phone call from a girlfriend in Guatemala that can only be made in that time window, they will roll up their sonnet and try and stuff it down your eye socket directly into your brain.

Avoid that, and they will follow you home and hide under your bed, and read it out as you sleep, subliminally imprinting your brain with pretentious imagery as you dream.

A favoured word of peripapatetic pub poets is “Desolate”. Every couplet mentions it, and every stanza that doesn't mention it has an air of desolation about it anyway. Relationships are desolate. Loneliness is desolate. Friendships involve a profound sense of desolation, and mental health is as desolate as the surface of the moon after a nuclear war.

Frankly, everything is far too fucking desolate.

But I have a suggestion. The next time a poet offers me a tract that features too much of this “D-Word” I will have them transported to the most barren desert in the universe, under a sun that blazes with so little mercy it would happily incinerate a starving child who had just watched their mother murdered. There they will write “Desolate” in the sand with a stick a thousand times in words one mile long.

And if they fail to complete that task within a year, a goat headed demon god from hell will appear, and give them an enema of burning sand.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.02.14

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