A Poem about Poetry (and other things) - Draft

Cutting

To forge a place at the cutting-edge
of literary fashion, you must chop
words, letters, even notions past their prime,
and give birth to a lexicon of redundancy:
phrases whose raison d’être has lost
its tussle with historical fact or cliché –
like EEC, God-slot, socio-poetic effing
and blinding, thee and thou, sex toys
and A-bombs that once had power
to shock a poem’s notional public.
I jettison J-cloths after one day;
that might be pushing a poet
too far. But L-plates certainly.
Simon Cowell, a name surely no one
will mouth on a deathbed. Ozone, woodchip,
pressure cookers, antidisestablishmentarianism,
peashooters, tripe, queues in the new
Europe, are you following me?
Swastika tattoos, afternoon tea – you must
move on to caffé latte. Close down the museum
of analogue TV, the debate over double u
or double you, ingénue, the vandalised tomb
of yesterday’s celebrity, the one who played Christ
stillborn in the revisionist Nativity. And ditch
the letter z, unless you are a bee
or asleep.