The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Babel.
It’s all babble.
I mean Babel. As in Tower of Babel.
We’ve built our tower and the higher up we get, the less we understand one another.
The thieves have taken up roosts in the new nesting places.
Come on in. They look just like the honest ones before them.
That new website and service. Oh, that’s Johnny’s new thing,
something he does when he gets home from elementary school.
He’s made ten bucks this month faking his way through the adult world.
Good for you, Johnny, keep up the good work.
Babel. It’s not what you say, but how you say it.
Babel. It’s hardly worth talking about because any talk at all just adds to the confusion. I’ll be the one who explains it, each writer writes.
Add the solution to the billion other solutions and we’ll see if he or she is right.
Or simply lost.
Babel

It used to be that…
Once, when I was young…
There is no time for that…
Does anything matter anymore?
Clever clever clever.
Something they don’t teach you in school is…
How come we can’t just get along?
Are others feeling the same way?
How come…
When the world ends…
Which project was the right project
and did I do it?
What knowledge is the right knowledge?
Or is the determining factor sexual attractiveness?
How come…
Where did it say that…
What is the thing that matters…
Is that growling in your brain or…
How come we need to muse on…
We are all executioners, daily, every day…
We dispatch others. We dispatch all.
Eliminate the competition. Be alone. Good enough.
We throw money over our heads. That’s just what we do.
Because we love it.

I once wrote thinking writing would be read.
When it was not I wrote more thinking it would be read.
It was not. I wrote more thinking it would be read. It was not.
I wrote more thinking it…then I died.

In death you see things that you wouldn’t see in life.
All of those arrows that I used to point people to the truth
were confusing to them, unwanted. So unread.
I can’t blame them.
I don’t want to look at other people’s arrows either.
Especially if they come with a mystic layer.
Perhaps my poetry is not sufficient.
Perhaps theirs as well. Perhaps all of our poetry is insufficient.
Or we believe that when we write such things we are preening.
So there was a huge upheaval against preening on the page.
And we all walked home, head bowed, shamed and believing rightfully so.

But there was no need for shame.
The world had logic’d itself into mayhem.
Poetry, the lost art of shameful practitioners
was the only place that really mattered anymore.
Prizes were given to people who wrote, even blandly, un-poetically.
For the words themselves, coming from the deep
mattered again, surprisingly. But not. Not in life.
But in death only.
Never in life.
So we wither upon the vine.