More Flarfist

poetry from Sharon Mesmer, Brooklyn’s leading avant-garde poet and performer.

Anyone can be angry.
But it takes balls to be angry with William Blake.
It also takes termites.
and echidnas and ants.

Being angry with William Blake
can be “deep” and also magnificently real
and critical.
It’s not like being a fan of everything,
because THAT’S easy: like being a fan
of a peanut in the peanut gun
of Elton John, straight-shot into the mouth
of the luminous high priest elephant bot
who navigates the stringiest runway
in the history of the battle of rabbit sexing.

Being angry with William Blake is to gravitas
what the Beatles were to Darren Stevens:
Samantha’s elephant-bot friend-with-benefits
OR: Hitler’s wife in a Prius.
Did you ever see that Twilight Zone
where the guy signed a contract
and they cut out his tongue and it wouldn’t die,
it just grew and pulsated and gave birth
to baby tongues?
Well, one of those baby tongues
was William Blake’s mother.

How can that be so simple? you ask.
Well, I know for a fact that William Blake said,
“Mother Blake, you are too simple.
You have ten children, and all of them are doing drugs together,
tied up by their eyes by zombies.
And that is just totally didactic and unworkble.”
And then Mother Blake said, “William Blake,
you have an extensive collection of hairnets
in your hamlet, and that’s enough
to hate you.”

Exactly.
If William Blake were ice cream,
he’d be peanut butter and dick.