Fred Aiken Writing

does poetry read better on the screen, in a book, on your phone,

while crapping out last night’s Taco Bell,

         you’d think I would’ve learned the lesson by now that my stomach

         doesn’t like diablo sauce,

or does poetry come across better while in bed in some large anthology,

some small chapbook that an independent press desperately mass produced 

in the hopes that it would save them from Chapter 11,

or is poetry something that should be a children’s rhyming book to help teach something,

someone, somewhere about the human condition

as it flexes through a cacophony of words spewed forth from a mountainous

complexion drawn from the thickest thesauruses, 

         I certainly wish I knew the game,

yet it seems that even AI can spit out the grandest, most eloquent poetry in the world,

and so now I don’t know where that leaves me, 

somewhere at the end, I guess,

though I doubt when it’s all been said and done, and the universe has finished expanding,

there won’t be much left of any of this crap,

I know I certainly won’t be here to see the end,

though maybe that’s enough

boxers or briefs, the pang of consistently feeling inadequate

to the flow of inexistence that ebbs 

        through a stranger’s dream web, and caught on the line

by a cruel universe that reels everything in with its gravity

that plunges into subatomic nakedness

        that squanders the meaning of the question,

boxers or briefs, a tightened noose waving to and fro

with the anticipation of a participant willing,

        forced or cajoled into sticking their head

through a hole that pulls and squeezes, until there’s nothing but suffocation,

flailing through the summer in nothing but 

        what God gave them, and the stilts of time defining what amounts to

boxers or briefs, on a questionnaire asking the difference between one cancer

or another that anyone would like to have for the rest of their life,

         so long as they stay planted

in their quagmire as they attempt to navigate their ignorance

at the edge of a pond while skipping rocks across the surface,

         though they never seem to go far,

boxers or briefs, is all any marketer or universe ever wants to know,

so that any answer about the great questions of life can be condensed,

        propagated, and sold off at a discount

and without any permission, though that’s never been the issue,

not so long as anyone customer could tell,

        standing in the aisle comparing one pair to another,

boxer or briefs, weighing the option with the possibility of going nude,

while wondering what that might feel like,

        would it be more liberating,

flaunting around town with a sense of superiority, trying

to mask the eventual, insubordinate thoughts of

        how inadequate the self is while standing in front of the mirror wondering,

boxer or briefs, late for work, late for school, late to pick up the kids,

all because of one of the dumbest questions in the world,

        yet despite the fact that no one will see them,

it makes all the difference whether or not there’s

boxer or briefs.