YVE LOUIS

The poet and YouTube war

You’d click to delete, to shift
the responsibility of witness:

this digitized web of weeping, speaking
body parts, mouths stopped mid-scream.

         No. Witness this,
         bear witness.

But how? How to make text against a poetics
of horror image, the outreach of seduction,

the down-spinning rush to pornography.
With what words counter your own nausea?

Voiceless,

you turn the graves of a more articulate age,
lift the bones of dead poets. Only the cleanest,

whitest; bone stripped of hyperbole, flabby
image - the neo-neo-classic of a generation

whose weapons were reasoned anger,
lethal restraint: lines clean of metaphor.

Now, to combat the poetics of web-voyeurism
you’d hone a nib of sharpened bone. Then aim,

cool,

deadly.