Netting Herring In the Run

As a preface to the following poem I think there are some things the readers need to keep in mind. For one, netting herring in the fish run makes the herring very easy to catch in vast quantity, but it is very illegal and interferes with the natural spawning cycle of an entire species. This poem is also very much in its transitional phase and has areas I am aware need explaining and work. I will get to the task as I am able to manage it but feel free to comment or ask questions if you're so inclined.

Also, this poem was written as a protest to "fixed" poetry contests that pre-pick the winners and are "judged" by the professors of those same winners. There are also many university sponsored poetry "contests" that cost a bundle of money to enter, in addition to the contests being fixed. This poem is the result of my research into such contests and the types of people who run them or endorse them. It is not intended as a general comment about any of the schools I have or will attend and is specific only to those institutions that make money off of aspiring, and naive, poets and writers by lying to them about their chances of winning while divesting them of their hard won earnings.

Netting Herring In the Run

There are too many poets,
Too many geniuses of verse,
No one stands out anymore.
It is the "same old, same old"
Of college life and English classes,
All held on the first day of the month
When there are bills to pay,
And no one wants to say anything
Very pleasant because someone might
Rip off the verses of their next poem.
Who will win the day and,
Forty years after they are dead,
Come back to haunt college students everywhere
Who are presently wondering how they will
Ever get ahead when all the professors they know
Publish their own poetry in
Dusty, care-worn journals,
Pages brittle with innuendo and subterfuge and, therefore,
Do not know where to send their students,
With pats on the back, to see their poems in print,
Because the students are not familiar
With the contest judges
And cannot send secret messages
That will make them the favorite student;
The next Lowell or Whitman?
They shy away from Sexton and Plath because
They killed themselves,
And the students sigh
And wonder, "How?"
Not understanding that you die before, when you
Incise your soul and drain all of
Its fluids away, down the stained morgue sink spotted with
Bits and pieces of human poems and hair
That clog the disposal and make someone
Have to insert a mind into dark recesses
Of grit and gore that horrify their thoughts.
Knowing the autopsy is in the latest book,
You can see the organs as they fail
And finally understand that ending
Was always going to be easier than
Staying around for the coroner's report.
Poetry, that never
Sees light of day, never
Breathes outside air, existing only in a
Rarified oxygen-miasma sublimating from academia's
Sullied crypt;
Unchaste desire and aspirations
Are interred in cold, moldy sepulchers.
Fame-lust gone awry, souring even more
With the approach of impending
Graduation doom.
College journals make apropos shrouds
For hopeful poets waiting in
Wings of static-time platform stages
Suspended in space outside of normalcy.
Walking woodenly, they
Approach gods ponderously deciding the fate
Of tethered verses and saddled instincts,
Bridling at the suggestion they
Are less than human, when all they
Have done is too human for
Morality plays to vaunt.
They sip sour milk and lemon juice cocktails with pickled onions
And spit vitriole onto the floor waiting
Until the new James Joyce pens another
"Ulysses" for tired minds to caress listlessly.
Yellow, age-worn teeth, still sharp enough
To tear out a heart or two, grind,
Masticating porridge souls into oblivion.
Wrinkled, weathered lusts, leathery and ugly,
Compromise in the dust under haunted library tables,
In plain sight of stagnant, emotionally skeletal students
Attending their schools of worldliness
Accredited by those who wallow there.
Pits of vipers too tired to hiss
Life into cleaning the place up,
Too comfortable in the
Warm cesspools allocated to them
For the manufacturing of soporific tomes
Into sleeping pills for tired minds;
A delirium of self-interest, boredom and tedious content,
Too thick to wade out of, pasty with dollars and cents,
Frying in a supernova of gazes from
Public people there to watch the
Animals in cages,
Hoping the bears will come out
Of hibernation soon so children can see,
Before the zoo locks its
Iron-clad attitudes and
Buries itself in dust, that all of its animals are extinct.

Dishonesty is an excellent preservative,
But it smells like rotting fish.