Poetry Is Useless

Did Dada die in vain?
Must we endure the pain of vowels straining
to accommodate both sound and sense?
Or be a liberal: take liberties
while our balls are shrivelling
in fear, as we struggle to straddle
both sides of the fence?
Poets have no place
in our pantheon of heroes
for they are no more use or ornament
than a circling flock of carrion.
They get right up our fundament
with their tum-ti-tum word choices.
We would not like our sisters to marry one
because their love for their own voices
is enough to make the Bard turn
in his grave, or switch to penning
verses for a Hallmark card.
Burn, burn with passion;
set your heart upon a stave.
It is not meant to be easy,
but it is hardly hard work
to learn of concrete forms and kenning,
the postmodern dialectic
that declares all bets are off: there is no truth,
no art but artifice, no beauty,
no shame in standing up and being counted as a berk.
Poetry is useless – and so it should be.
We waste our lives waging a war of attrition
over words worth less than the paper they are written on.