Some things poets seem to have forgotten
My Grandmother turned me on
Poetry and philosophy
She used to collect clippings
Of poems from the local newspaper
I read Tennyson, Yeats, Blake
In her book collection
She read those poems often
The pages were old and bent
Years later, I would write
My philosophy in poems
With my own clippings
Of Taoism, Buddhism, Sufism
And transhumanism, but I knew
By the time the singularity reached us
Poetry might have gone extinct
The poetry of the high-bow
Is now so inaccessible, without
Seemingly, any deeper meaning
The trend to write dead things
That passes as coldly as a poor display
Perhaps the future of poetry
Lies in the fringe verse
Of the downtrodden and in the
Privileged academic babble
Of poets who make art without
A true connection to the zeitgeist
I don’t need a Masters in Fine Arts
In poetry or creative writing
To feel entitled, but women like my grandmother
Will die out, millennials are making
Other choices, they don’t need to
Be starving artists to get that poetry is dead
And even the idea of becoming a writer
I once had a roommate who became
A famous journalist, maybe he
Knew something then that I only realize now.
Wuji Seshat 