To Poets Who Whine About
the Inadequacy of Language

If you distrust words
so much, why not
shut up? Why waste
the sacrificed flesh
of trees, or strew your
anemic traces across
our computer screens
(each pixel lit by burning
400-million-year-old
ferns and trilobites,
or butchering big rivers
with the blades of turbines)?
You’d deplete the earth
to trumpet your faithlessness?
Why not simply learn
to paint, or play the flute,
or bow in bewitched
silence over a whirling
potter’s wheel?
Words don’t serve
because you won’t serve
them. So: Get thee hence!
And don’t let the sacred
door of the dictionary
hit you in the ass.