Poets in Meerkat Manor (2 poems about poetry movements)

POETRY MOVEMENTS

I guess it used to bother me.
It's not like they do an awful lot of telemarketing
during dinner hours really.
It is sort of weird how much
their lives resemble each other's.
That part sorta creeps me out.
We're all older and they're dying
just like everybody else...
all you have to do is look at them
and the Photoshopping going on
to get the pathos. Skateboarding
at fifty or the denial implicit
in climbing Mount Denali
intead of scarfing Denali Moose Tracks.
You appreciate the soul screaming its "No!"
at the yogurt diaper and all that.
You know we should probably pull for them.
The dying tends to soften most,
or at least one hopes the gods
give them that gift eventually.

Why critique them for the shirts

they wore in high school?






POETRY MOVEMENTS


So now I sort of see it more
as meerkatting than marketing.
That poetry movement is just Meerkat Manor.
You get to feel a weird empathy
when you realize the extended babysitting
networking the colony has evolved.
How they shepherd the babies
from safe hole to safe hole.

And then as the Eagle comes
and takes one of them,

you want to cry. Yes,

it was just a meerkat. Still.

Look at how he scuttled.

Look how serious she was about the tribe.

Look at the empty place he leaves

on the hot barren soil, or the claw marks

she left on the other meerkat's forehead

that time they squabbled about ideology

of the Meerkat cause, and what it meant

to be there, right then. The sincerity

of each chatter and wail. The cute way

their heads popped up out of the holes

in language and chittered an episteme.


That's gotta deserve some sort of an audience.