another featurepoem from defunct blog

POETIC LICENSE

When I pick up a new poetry book

I always glance first at the biographical note
If the poet has children I don't read the book

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This "poem" if you can call it that, is not from any of the books [I've been publishing lately] . . . It is a segment from a book called "Nights of Naomi" which came out in the early 1970s and which I have no fondness for.  I've never reprinted most of the writing in it, and never will.  For me, those pages no longer exist.  If I could push a button and destroy every copy of that book, I would—only of course I don't need such a button, posterity will do the job for me just as utterly as any delete device.  

But as to this particular piece: why did I ever write such nihilist nonsense?  Why would I even think of such a thing to begin with, and then, having hatched it out of spite and envy and hatred of other's happiness in their marriages and parental pleasures and all the loving domesticities life had and has always denied me, having conceived its nasty note, why write it and print it?   My resentment and self-pity at not having, of never having had the opportunity of having, what "everybody else" had, has, a spouse, a marriage, a family— 

So the boy from the orphanage is going to spit at all that which "they"—all those fortunate others—enjoy.  The boy from the orphanage is going to write this "poem" which isn't a poem, but a curse.  And the evil he expresses is his in the end, rebounds on him with the fatal verdict time imposes on his vain vanished and vanishing words.

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