"Goddamned Poets," a poem, by Margaret Benbow

Today a poet friend sent me images of himself
in performance totaling,

unbelievably, 10,000k, crashing into my computer
like an eighteen-wheeler. There

are several different views of him preening at a lectern
so that one could
admire him

from every angle. What is it about poets? He's a
pretty good guy
normally.

I told my brother Larry about this, and said I was glad
to be
blessedly

free from such juvenile vanity
myself.
Larry then brought up

completely
irrelevantly, I feel,

a painful scene at a reading where some punk kid
embarrassed

himself by making the big mistake of supposing
it was his turn to read.

It was MY turn.

Larry said that he "much admired the steely smile
with which you refused to yield the stage,"
but that some might call it vanity.

Oh, bullshit.