By David Gullette
Featured Art: “Doomed From the Start” by Thad DeVassie

I mean, 
suppose you opened up your reader’s heart but carelessly
left in the cavity a jagged mixed metaphor? 

Or swore in writing to tell only the truth but used invisible
ink and the stiffed readers cried “Fraud!” and came after you
with something resembling pitchforks? 

Or your rap sheet said you repeatedly named emotions
instead of re-enacting that spot of time that would shake
your readers to the core without telling them what to call
it? 

Or in your fine poem the fine print is
flea-bitten with clichés like “to the
core” 
or “I had never been so unhappy in my life” or
“My father always told me” etc.? 

Or at the Open Mic you groaned out your poem with the
endless Gregorian monotone the Poets’ Theatre calls “The
American Drone Strike”? 
(audience shuffles, checks watches, stares at ceiling). 

Mistakes have consequences, people!
That’s why you need to sell your
house cash in your Roth 
pawn your first edition of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
signed “For (your name here) very cordially John Ashbery”
so you can buy our top-of-the-line policy that covers all the
mishaps mentioned above a list that (believe me) only
“scratches the surface.” 

We offer multiple paths of escape from your . . . Let’s
call them slip-ups 
including a new identity as some nondescript who
evinces no interest in writing anything followed by
transplantation to some mindless spot 
(American Virgin Islands?) where no one will
recognize you as the guy whose sonnet used the
same rhyme twice: 
especially after your state-of-the-art
face and hair and voice transplants
[Part 3, paragraphs 4–6] that will
make you unrecognizable 
even to your dead mother who keeps popping up in your poems like a
(hey, time for a moratorium on similes). 

You didn’t think of all this when you were in Poetry School.
Or during your Residency. 
Or were made Partner. 
Or got mentioned in Dispatches as 
“once up-and-coming and now a known quantity
in the world of American poetry.” But this is the
real world, kid. 
Real and unforgiving. 
One false move and down you go. 
Which is why Insurance was invented. 

After the first substantial deposit 
along with the sworn affidavit in which you promise
to lay off poetry once and for all it’s a series of
manageable monthly payments wired to our
headquarters in the Cayman Islands, where no one
remembers anything. It’s not that we forgive you (not
our job). 
It’s that we cover your tracks and
make you disappear long before
your pen has gleaned your
excessively teeming brain. 

And what a relief that will be!

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David Gullette was one of the first editors of Ploughshares and founded http://www.fenwaypress.com. He is Literary Director of The Poets’ Theatre of Boston.