Morsesh*t by John Hodgen
To start it off! Rattle’s Daily Poem of September 14th, 2022!
Rattle is a Magazine known for trying not to be pretentious- which is already quite pretentious. Nonetheless, it has a decent curatorship. Pardon me if such is not the most popular or even the most correct term. It is a foreing language to me all of this Englishry and I’m trying not to do my best.
John Hodgen
QUIET QUIT
Most of us
at the end
will quiet quit
will recognize
body
as mystery
a history
book we must
return
a requirement
a requisite
each line on our face
or hand a pink slip
a dance stamp
ultraviolet
allowing us
to be returned
to re-admit
body as thesis
exegesis
op. cit.
loc. cit.
to wit
an extra Jesus
at the core of it
body a tool and die
shop breaking
bit by bit
a Morse code
telegraph
dot dot
dit dit
even our clothes
refusing to fit
like sitting on
Clint Eastwood’s lawn
telling everyone
to git
saying what soldiers say
when they get shot
I’m hit
I’m hit
when all we want
is to get lit
like a funeral pyre
a fiery pit
a piece of shit
like the game is over
like tag
you’re it
And here we go!
Did you notice it was 139 words long? I mean, at what-I-thought-was the middle I started counting it out of sheer spite! And there we went at about 90 words until the end.
That is a short poem which manages to be tiresome and YET. Yet it also has no freaking poetical resources whatsoever.
Maybe thinking we wouldn’t notice the unpleasantly syncompated rythm, he even made it clearer it was a Morse Code reference by stating it to dumber audiences. Bro! What the freaking hell!
I can appreciate less nuanced, straightforward poetry. We have Pessoa, Bukowski, Hilst etc. But this is sheer garbage!
I’ve been noticing for a while that Rattle appreciates that poet’s spite regarding diction. I mean Aristotelian diction, that one which resembles vocabulary, the choice of words. They pretend they enjoy simple writing, whatever this is. I always sensed some condescending attitude right there because I myself, who am not a native English speaker, have some trouble with all that stuff. But they don’t take mistakes, I can prove it, although they claim some spite regarding canonical English.
And then we have this abbreviation nonsense, latinorium, as we say it here in my Latinoamericano country. It serves no purpose throughout the text at all. Even thesis and exegesis, which are more Ancient Greek stuff… It is almost unarguable that those make any sense if not showing he can write those words without the possible aid of a dictionary.
I had to go after what “git” means and haven’t found a verb for it yet. Maybe that happened because such is a very unusual word according to my linguistic corpus. Perhaps Rattle may just have exceeded the affirmative action share for old slang here. I don’t know.
As for what it is about. Getting old. A decent subject for sure! There is a quieter idea of some cancer there, some agnostic stuff here and done.
No idea what he meant with Clint Eastwood on a lawn and soldiers. Can’t comment on that. Most of the imagery he brought is just dull.
The best verse was the last. I really liked the idea. But the poem is overall rubbish.
And, he used the same idea before on a poem named Forget-Me-Not. I’m not most overwhelmed by flamboyant variations and awesome resourcefulness in that sense. But occupying the stand of younger talents is something that bother the sh*t out of me.
Won’t be grading the poems yet. But this one and the publication it received is an A+ in terms of creative economics. Self-plagiatory stuff. Just sucks.
