Poetry from Noah Berlatsky

The most efficient way to write a poem

Is to find another poem and take out the heart.

Leave the other poem where you found it bleeding out.

If it were efficient it would have survived 

like the catfish deserting a sinking ship.

After it has sunk, they crawl about the bottom

chewing on the rats and the hands

that didn’t get out.

That is natural selection.

 The best poems are the poems that are here.

They persevere through merit.

They go to Burning Man to find more truth.

Shelley has built a Byronic hedge fund

of virtue and innovation.

It stands naked and peeing in the night of wisdom.

And where its urine spatters test scores rise

like manly locks shaking in the storm of cost benefit analysis.

 This is the poem that ate your heart.

This is the poem whose heart was eaten.

We need less blood and more Human Resources 

if we are to go into the dark of genius

and emerge with the light of anthology.

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