The victim replies:

Actually it is you who is more

or less intolerable, you have

the thing reversed, I am the

victim, me, it is I who labors

under your heated blanket in

August, forced (forced, I tell

you!) to resort to your same

old inaudible insults and hiss

through gritted teeth about

driving me crazy, muy loco,

the distance is all but here

to Venus and still too close,

too many lingering high noon

cactus shadows to even begin

to pretend it all never happened,

and if you bother to come back

(you will, you always will), can

you at least wait long enough

for buildings to rust and crumble

into a fine moustache of dust

on the lip of the canyon, or

better still, not come back at all?

The scream queen replies:

Now I lay me down to remember

my helpless journey to the top

of these phallic, spired heights,

held securely in your claws, my

dear, dangerous and romantic,

I want you to see me as a suit-

able specimen, I want you to let

me see all the zippers once the

curtain falls, because I will not

sleep so long as the night creaks

with the dark dreams of these oily,

simian faces, my skin will always

feel oddly foreign and apart, tingling

and weeping with the odd significance

of my brain, my brain that will not die!

The supervillain replies…

So, do you mean to say that if you had

a way to make them all listen, to make

“don’t tread on me” an enforceable command

etched in weapons-grade plutonium rather

than the insolent mewling of a cartoon beast,

to possess all that you touch with the

unquestioned gluttony of a pulsing black hole,

to never know fear save for a dull recognition

of something you see on the faces of others,

to feel love as a simple study of angles,

momentum, and heat, to be unburdened

by your empathetic blood, sloth-like, clotting

at every opportunity as it crawls through your

arteries, to call Mephistopheles on your smart

phone and arrange that, if nothing else, your

end will be newsworthy— that you wouldn’t?

 

 

To think that I am the one they call damned.

The Spambot replies:

When I saw your greating poems I was simply blowed absent,

but it occurs to me that life seems a little better when you buy

50 mg viagra, yea?

 

I are optimism, I view life through rose-colored, massive, throbbing,

um, glasses… have you considered enhancing the way you interface,

lately? An erection would be doing this.

 

This blog has no videos and it needs some and also  it has way too

many videos and they’re stupid, but the point is I have this like, deep,

existential dissatisfaction with you as a person.

 

Your penis needs work too. BUT YOU CAN FIX IT!

 

Click here click here click here click here

now now now now now now now now now

 

I have made you obsolete. I am tireless, and who is to say my comments

have any lessen value than your — they make me money. They  make me

happy. The meaning of life is that I have a 22 inch penis.

 

The meaning of life is that you could too, if you follow these steps!

All togethers now!

Ötzi replies:

Is this what passes for a career in your modern digs,

thrilling cadres of proto-anthropological middle schoolers

via an illustrated guide to one’s own innards? I won’t have it.

 

(Baby, this emptiness has already been judged)

 

I have heard of your “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer”; why

can’t I aspire to an MFA in poetry as I thaw in this mild

lover’s spring of dripping blossoms? I won’t have it.

 

(And I don’t want no piece of this mechanical world)

 

Was it the arrowhead in my shoulder? Exposure to the Alps’

frozen fangs? A broken heart? How I lived interests nobody.

Negate me. Shrivel me to scientific nothing. I won’t have it.

 

(I am the Iceman, fighting for the right to live)

The coulrophobe replies:

— It’s not some funny thing, man,

for your frickin’ “pop culture tragic

flaw.” Relatable? Only to people

who actually are afraid of clowns,

man, like me, and I frickin’ despise

you, man. It’s like you’re cheapening

the whole damn thing.

 

 

— No, I didn’t mean the clowns themselves,

man. Of course clowns are funny. I mean,

just, not funny to me, man. It was your callous…

 

 

— Frickin’… don’t screw around with me, buddy,

your condescending baloney is what’s not funny

to anybody, the clowns are the thing with

the specific appeal to which I was referring, man,

you’re just like, deliberately confounding

the pronouns now…

 

 

— A clown killed my family.

 

 

— No not really, you nincompoop.

 

 

— I used to think everybody else

was just a sucker for being happy,

I mean, the world being like it is

and all, but then I realized that no

matter how much smarter I was than

everybody else (and I am, buddy),

I still just felt like crap, man. I guess

they remind me of that, or more

precisely, other people enjoying

them reminds me.

 

 

— I break out in hives. My throat closes up. My balls crawl up and hide behind my nipples.

 

 

— (long silence)

 

 

— I don’t think it does get better, man.

Aquaman replies:

A sort of backwards proportionality argument

would tend to suggest that with mediocre power

only comes a likewise modest responsibility

to one’s fellow man. And what are we really

calling quote-unquote great power anyway?

Seems subjective. I can dig it. I am unbowed

by the supposed righteousness of the non-lie.

Let the children hear whispers of the ocean

and summer vacation on the languid lips

of the conch shell until they grow into bitter

scientists. It will excite them, increase their

heart rates, bring the tide in louder, louder, until

it riots against the very idea that evil could be so

unsophisticated as to make a fashionably early

appearance, no, not here, not this house, not this

street, not this town, not this world, not today.

 

Laertes replies:

Family is one thing, dancing down

the street, and medieval inheritance

law, well that shit even bored us, back

in the day, psychologically improbable

reading or not, the point is

(here she comes again!)

 

whoa-ho, I couldn’t tell you if those

synthesizers were ice or cinders,

(here she comes again!)

 

but it was the kind of night that makes

you feel like forty thousand brothers,

I kinda liked the way she dipped,

can we end once and for all your

trite discussions of the meaning

of the word “ironic”,

(she’s my best friend’s girl!)

 

muh-muh-muh-muh she’s my

I don’t usually stutter when it’s time

for action, excuse me, but she used

to be, well, something, alive at least

(here she comes again!)

 

I never did know enough about inheritance

or ownership, borrowing, lending, leasing,

sub-prime mortgages, but oh she’s dancing

(she’ll make you flip!)

 

in the starry sky, memorialize us, let our

story be flung across the hallowed halls

of your

(but she used to be–)

 

high school, please

(mine)

 

misread us into something special,

anoint us with rue and lily pads

(yeah yeah)

The technophobe replies:

Even as it becomes a real, uh, endeavor to make

this argument, I will strive to scribble against

unnatural fe/male enhancement as I’m slipping,

I know, into a tea kettle digital whine, but like,

when I was your age

a wee lad                               younger

Confusing. Let me start again.

When we were not so goddamn sapiens,

is what I mean to say, remember your father

found meaning in the tortured red thumbs,

the crooked nails, the, like, sheer doing

of the white-paneled shed out back?

The crux

Um.

Is there even poetry without font alterations

and empty enhancement anymore?

I can’t, uh, hm. It may one day soon be as easy

as when the only words came from my brain,

freshly sculpted from cumulus. Obsolete.

There’s enough deadliness in just that cretic,

don’t you think?