Posted Poetry

by Fred Aiken

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