What I do is total commercialism, but it’s also art[.]
     I like the challenge of doing both, of somehow making art
     that is accessible and making commerce something artistic.
                       —Madonna¹

Don’t let what inhabits you inhibit you,
     artists harness chaos into something great
     that communicates with people, poets are
     the perverts who take the secrets of the heart
     and translate them into language that can be
     shared, scarred by the claws of love, too wounded to

care, we give off what power we have without
     ever giving up, we’ve heard it all before
     but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear it
     again, interrogate yourself, knocking boots
     to hard rock, rubbing the public the wrong way
     with harder cocks robbing poetry of its

unwashed poverty, stealing coughing drops of
     diamonds during the height of the coal wars,
     turning to fuel the tears of crisis, the smut
     that runs is the cola that pours from the wide
     mouth of what un-faced terror of yours we out
     when we open ours and shout forth its froth that

won’t ruin the hose but cleanse the soul, burning
     from it all that being obtuse withholds, I’ve
     got dandy issues no labels can push their
     pins down through, darker corners than your scarred fists
     can box me into, sharp carnations of quips
     bleeding from unbuttoned holes bottoming for

the high of giving you fools the underhand,
     you want to be the apostrophe in my
     philosophy but you’re all blind Cyclopses,
     a sad pile of dimmed eyes, exorcised zeitgeists,
     and splintered cinders, exiles flickering on
     an island not even close to my shadow,

truly, Millennials, I’d rather you’d been
     burned and razed in the Nineties, a bonfire of
     your inanity, dividing the U ’n’
     I in verse, winnowing from lips words the chapped-
     assed and over-waged gap of ageless faces
     tax, thieving from us blessed with a bliss of text

our weapons but not yet our plan of attack,
     what’s seen on the periphery what makes seem
     more sane this game we play with our pain’s tour of
     consciousness, this war on your hands a brand of
     menace we used to eat when beauty was bad
     to the tasteless, those clueless mega-bitches,

fashion’s victims bagging editors for vague
     glimpses of forgiveness, metaphors of its
     feigned existence, to take heaven’s implicit
     promise of a second coming and somehow
     make it worth artistic treatment, to turn up
     the volume and explicate for burn-outs just

how hot it can be to trust the voice inside,
     biting us since poets are pornographers
     selling us journeys they write, lust telling how
     god works through disasters, naturally, side-
     eye and sighing, holding back my tears as I
     hold back your hair, bellowing laughter at how

little I cared then and daresay I never
     will, not again about people whose concern
     for their past amounts to that none of them have,
     whether for lovers or vanquished enemies,
     worshipping the future, scattering seeds
     of integrity, you purposeless persons

whose abuse of electricity mistakes
     a spark of interest for fame, the current
     of events for a wave of favouritism
     that paves the streets of your forgotten cities,
     far from the expressionless famine of your
     selfies and symbols that have no status with

me, I sit in my den where no citizens
     are welcomed, unmoved by the quaking of tombs
     whose tenants walk though will not wake, you zombies
     stalking the master to whom you are all slaves,
     content to feast alone on the truth of your
     fictions ripped from my page, I am not ashamed.

__________
¹Madonna, interviewed by Stephen Holden in “Madonna Re-Creates Herself—Again” of the National Edition of The New York Times, published on March 19, 1989; page 2002001.