There's a certain poet...

...on Facebook (not a FB friend of mine) whose poems I like to read. I like to read them because they entertain me in a kind of twisted way -- I marvel at their consistency of thematic repulsiveness. All of his poems are about angst, despair, the world's inherent ugliness and malignancy. As if the word "poet" must always mean "I'm dark and so should you."

But where is it written that a poem must always face-suck out a reader's liver and rip it to bleeding pieces? Good grief.

Of course, everyone occasionally becomes a monkey on a pogo stick on the edge of an abyss. But the world has other things in it besides precariousness and abysses.

I wonder if this fellow is capable of taking his cosmic chagrin and transforming it, via self-irony and sublimation, into a different kind of work: of some wonderment at the manifold presences and possibilities of being? Probably not. He most likely prefers his role as Oracle of Perpetual Misery. And people keep applauding his chronic darkness. Like I say, it is entertaining, in a bizarre way -- like watching a vampire try to bite his own neck. But this kind of thing really shouldn't be encouraged.