Little thing,
I've read your broadsides, your smug polemics,
your vague superior manifestos
on the mechanics of hate and the politics of suicide.
You claim to have been there, trod the morass,
but I see no swamp-grass on your shoes,
no crusted blood under your fingernails.
With your young limbs and child's eye
you ascended a mountain of words,
proclaimed yourself high priest,
began doling out cheap wisdom from a prefab temple,
telling me how to live, why to live, whether to live.

Little thing, you know nothing.
Let me work real wisdom on you with my hands.

If the world worked, trains would run on time,
hurricanes would remain at sea,
and all POETS
(in capital letters boldface type)
would be drowned like kittens.
Because some of us have no need to conjure
fervid intensity and existential despair.
We need but stand still
and they're on us like sudden snapping wolves.

Listen to me, little thing.

When you've paid for your wisdom in the hardest currency,
the coldest cash,
When you've engineered disasters just to shatter the silence
and spiked the soft throats of your friends for ink,
When guilt becomes a luxury and sabotage a reflex,
When you come to crave hate
because only her breath, hot on your neck, can get you hard,
When the woman you love jabs
the point of a box cutter under your eye,
and you beg her to blind you,
Then come to me
and tell me about the world.
 

-John Nettles