When All Else Fails
Jason Wilkinson

Pretend to be Beat.

This includes (but is in no way limited to)
dressing and grooming oneself
in a manner which implies
carelessness in the extreme.

Purchase a set of bongo drums.

                 A humidor.
                 Some jazz records.
                 Haiku For Dummies.

Abscond into the mountains and contemplate selflessness;
or at the very least act as though you have.

Make up words if necessary.

Because when you lack the means to
string together all the ones that
Merriam-Webster recognizes
in a cogent fashion
one may convincingly argue
that it is.

Go to Manhattan and loiter on a subway platform.

Bring lots of photocopies of your work
—the vagrants and the hookers and the lawyers
will all be content to practice a lay-up
at the next wastebasket they meet.

Self publish.

This not only allows you to circumvent rejection,
the unrelenting bane of legitimate artists worldwide,
it also lends you the opportunity to connect
with other disenfranchised writers of gibberish
who likewise came to believe one day that
attaching their pen name to the rank and file of an archaic movement
(i.e., something that has come and gone)
should place them amid the furls of a dense veil beyond which
unadulterated nonsense
might be authored with impunity.

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