Can We Be Frank? Nobody Understands Poetry. Nobody Understands String Theory, Either. But You Don't Look Like an Ignoramus Not Understanding String Theory.

Tobias Mindernickel's newly-released magnum opus,  "Me, Myself, I, & Friends," has the vanity press tripping all over itself to sing its praises, with one anonymous critic claiming, "It encapsulates the entire poetic form from Homer to the present day. Indeed, it is the ne plus ultra. To read it is to understand everything." -- TM.

Whoever TM is, that person has exposed once and for all the ugly truth about poetry and its shadowy network: Not only does the emperor have no clothes, he is running buck naked through the streets and screaming like a banchee.

Persons of goodwill have suspected as much for thousands of years, but have long been afraid to admit it in polite society.  Now, aided by the instantaneous global electronic dissemination of thought and the lack thereof, Mindernickel's explosive arrival on the scene has heralded the winter of our discontent. Overnight, the world has changed. Ancient literary regimes are falling like dominoes, testament, indeed, to the unintended consequences of the "send" button. 

Here is the straw that sent the camel to the camel chiropractor and parented a revolution:

Life, Death, And Everything in Between

I came home from the fishmonger's
To discover that my doppelganger
Had locked himself in the master bathroom.

I cried out to the gods:
"Oy vey zmir!
This is unjust on so many levels!"
The gods did not hear my cry.

And so I wept for the half-finished acrostic
In the 3 month-old Harpers
Now locked away from me so cruelly
Together with the only working pen in the house.

I pounded on the door with a plaintive query,
To wit:  "How long are you going to be in there?"
And was met with the icy silence of indifference.

In an instant, what was mine
Had been snatched from me,
The way a crow snatches a robin's egg
For no other reason
Than that he can.

Life is surely unfair.
First, my doppelganger gets more girls than I do,
And now this!

I dream of what could have been.
If only I had been,
Could have seen,
Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

Carpe diem
Carpe[t] cleaning
Carp[e] from the fishmonger -- kosher* 
Catfish, not.

Yesterday, I was home all day.
If my doppelganger had come then,
Everything would have been different.
Oh, what a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours! 

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In less time than it takes to say: "Tobias Mindernickel has announced that he will not be a candidate in the next election," this oeuvre has become the emblem of a new era. Some have dubbed it "Post, Post-Modernist," others, "The After-Party."

Whatever we call it, this much cannot be denied: The world we knew is no more. There is no turning back now -- that would mean Recalculating Route. 

And if we have to listen to that metallic voice one more time, we will probably fly off the handle, I swear!

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*Source: Kashrut.com