Automatic Writing

The automatic poem wrote itself,
its pen, a jumbled board of keys,
a trivial swill of data and, here,
a work of art, soi-disant, appears.

And who’s to say, anyway,
‘no poem, no rhyme,
that’s not it, this crock of shit’?

Should a poet reply as others have,
‘fuck it, fuck it, my toilet is a bucket,
what’s it to you, if it’s what I do’?

My automatic writing is,
just supposing, juxtaposing
delusion with clarity,
as if insight is a rarity
in the world of online poets
who are self-deceived and just don’t know it
and I’m not sharing but actually daring
the bards who find it hard to hand out
anything but judgement
to give us the benefit of a doubt.

Say what you want, words get written,
born and abandoned to break or make it;
out there mumbling, once shy, twice bitten
channeled flanneling, seldom mastered.

Put-downs, shoot-downs,
work no better than good advice,
because it’s easy to be nice,
to offer positive witticism,
not vicious criticism.

The automatic poem wrote itself,
my fingers followed the keys
for ten whole minutes.

It’s a poem because it says so;
I’m the poet, what do I know?

BH, 2020

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Someone posted a pretty harsh (poem?) about telling crap poets just how crap they are, for their own good. It contended that a poem itself was not a poem just because it was written (analogy: a bucket’s not a toilet even when you crap in it). Like the anaglogy, the poem wasn’t that great.

Rather than take its advice and be similarly blunt I wrote this (now considerably edited) as a riposte. And to consider the inescapable possibility that a poem sometimes exists outside the poet. And, in any case, positive is better than negative, wit better than calumny. And even more, that I’ll still write what I bloody-well like.