The Tourist-Castle Poet Takes it !! (phase 1 of proposed torture)

I hate, I hate, I hate, I just fucking hate the stupid fucking Tourist-Castle poem.

Yes, I’ve just had it with this retarded, anemic variety of the Tourist poem. Almost all Tourist or Travel poems suck. But this one’s got super-human suction lips!

This poem is where some jackoff tourist (I borrow the word jackoff from Ted Berrigan talking about Irish Jackoffs trying to be radio waves at a St. Patrick’s Day parade), sits at a cafe or a park by a castle. Feels a glow. At peace. The most wonderful beautiful feeling ever. Like someone discovering the magic of sex. But worse! And then just has to write it down. In their notebook. Or, worse, on a napkin. Blah, blah.

These scourge poems invariably are titled something like:

“Lines Written at the Cafe Twimbledon across from the Castle Twimbledon, Twimbledon, Scotland, March 4, 2004” ……..(and if the poem WAS written on a napkin that makes it into the title too!

These poems are inevitable. Drop a novice poet in a foreign country and he’ll find a castle in two fucking seconds and the poem will be written, effortlessly, magically, on the spot (O Scourge!) and foisted on to some adoring public in some shitass review full of beautiful glowing Tourist-Castle poems. I’m just waiting for a review called The Tourist-Castle Review so I can bomb their fucking cars and offices.

Berrigan liked to beat people up. He liked Michaux for this same reason. I invoke you both now gentlemen: your fists and your swords and your delicate medieval torture instruments. And let’s push these fucking tourist poets down into the basements of the castles they so glowingly and sickeningly sang about. And let’s rack them and sack them and quarter them and make them eat thousands and thousands of Tourist-Castle Poems. And let’s suck the bowels from their asses with contraptions built especially for the purpose. Or, for lack of availability or simply for variety, a starving street rat.