A polemic against poetry

Why do you play these games with yourself? 
Talk right. Listen with your whole body.
You don’t get to feel EVerything ALL the time.
You don’t get to choose the color of every sunset, either.
Sometimes a flame is just a flame
and it will burn you every time you touch it
even when you close your eyes.
How many people can you stuff into one brain?
Uncrowd yourself. Think less.
Keep your whole heart in Tupperware in the freezer.
You’ll grow out of it—the rhyming,
and the looking at your own face in the mirror like you’ve never seen it before.
You are who you are and you can’t shift shape,
no matter the angles of the rooms
you lock yourself in. You locked yourSELF in,
you know. The rest of us keep track
of our keys. The rest of us fall in love with one cemetery
and keep on digging til we’re done.
Come watch TV with us. Come stand in the crowd
and ignore your own bones.
Poltergeist? HA.
You can’t be an urn AND a vehicle.
Here’s how time works: Lost, then now, then always.
That’s it. There’s nothing waiting for you
at the bottom of that well.
You won’t live through this. You won’t wake yourself up.
What’s the difference between a fall and a jump?
Don’t say we didn’t tell you so.
Words are words and painkillers are painkillers
and there’s only one good way to be human
and it’s to avoid being human at all.

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