Sick of Sickness

by Victor D Sandiego | Published: Jun 21, 2022

I am so SICK!, I am DYING MA!

Why you ask? Why should I die of an evil, evil illness. Allow me to explain, to stream the resonant reasons on the page. You see….

I saw the best minds… fuck that.

I saw the best minds of my… wait... fuck that too.

I am sick. I am dying, Mother. I have read Allen Ginsberg and still:

I have seen the most promising poets of my generation give in to the thrill of publication. I have seen them convert their belief into audience approval. I have seen them throw their best words, their most denouncing indictments into the maybe-later pile, the maybe-later-comes-never pile and I have so-wept for my own solitude and for the solitude of my peers, enamored with approval, flushed with vaporous success as they flicked the crackling book-store-mic ON!! to the dense approving applause of other subservient poets, the only audience come beat the rain, come to hear WORDS confirming their own mediocrity, their fabulous STEEL willingness to REITERATE what everybody else has said before them.

I am so SICK. So sick of being sick. So sick of hearing a broken-record stanza PRAISED! for its transition from one beautiful mundane flower to another. Sick of wondering where your beautiful Grandmother went or WHY she might give a shit about RIGHT NOW in her fanatic age of entombment.

Where are my brothers who see beyond the billboards? This is my frustration. Where are my sisters?

(Of course), I am killing my own cattle. I am slaughtering my own chances to MAKE IT in the EXCITING everyday world.

And why? you say? Why you say NO when I protest customary reading, every KEEP-OUR-TOMB-UNDER-THE-RADAR spittle of voices all aghast with the latest bridge-or-no-bridge to be built against an incumbent sea of voices crying in their vast latte-gone-tepid wilderness???

OH, how they are so submerged! How the crocus barely bloomed that year! How Mother almost forgot to kiss each poet on the cheek before she tucked them into bed each harrowing night!! That fucking dog that died! The sweet old cat that lived for one more cancerous year before she puked her life out onto the rug!!

If that is all there is, I resign. I walk a willing pirate plank and plunge my head into the sea. There is more to life than banging slogans.