The Future of Poetry

A friend of an acquaintance
is a poet laureate of a zoo.
I can only imagine the keeper of monkeys,
the Grand Pumbah of Turtles
receiving a letter,
"hi, can your iguanas
be represented by my verse?"
Could I be a poet laureate of
a high-rise office building,
would a paper company write about me
in their annual report:
look, we support the arts!
The world is weird
poetry is easier
when zoos have poet laureates
and blogs are free
and anyone can print a book.
poetry is harder,
something I realized in the book store
where every poet in the shelves
was already dead
and I was thinking,
"if I'm going to pay fifteen dollars,
I want it to go to someone alive."
I asked the sales clerk and
she typed up the names in her computer;
no, they're not coming in or
wait til this september,
his new book is coming in.
Okay, where are his old books?
"Poor bastard" was my diagnosis
but then I remembered, the point
was not to sell books, to make money,
to leech the life out of art
in order to support a life,
the point was to say, be heard,
and that was free for the taking
somewhere in cyberspace.