Why I Am Not a Poet

I'm not really a poet, I think.
Why? Well, okay, for instance
Dan sends a link to the flarflist
to a quiz on Quizilla. I drop in.
"Which 20th Century Poet
Are You?" it asks. I take the
test. It says I'm Sharon Olds.
Isn't that what Dan got?

Yeah. It's also what Kasey gets
a few minutes later. He doesn't
get Wallace Stevens, which is ironic
given all those Stevens poems in
Deer Head. Drew and Maria,
however, do. Jordan, whose e-mail
hasn't been reliable since he got
that promotion, gets T.S. Eliot.
... Anyway, so that's one reason.

More telling, however, is that, okay
today I thought of this funny word
combination--"pecker spectacles."
It's funny, right? Like glasses, but
with dicks pointing out of them, or
glasses, literally, for your pecker,
or even a "spectacle of the pecker"
which sounds like billboard-sized porno.
I do a Google search. Pretty soon I've got
100 pages of words, the Google results, e.g.
"It was called 'Baboon With A View' and John
wore black spectacles, huge furry orange ..." etc.
But there should be so much more, not of spectacles
but of words, of how terrible spectacle is
and life. Minutes go by. My "poem"
is finished. I call it HAVE EGG FOR KOW TOM?
And I think, "yeah, that's pretty okay, but
it's not great like Drew's poem, 'UNIVERSITY DIAPER
HEATERS,' now that was a poem."