Regarding Your Career:
Your books are worthless.
Your perfect-bound, professionally-made, trade paperbacks from the bigger names
in the small press are worthless.
Your rice-paper handcrafted signed and numbered achievements are worth less
than the formaldehyde stuck to a dead poet’s balls.
Your credits, your blog, your hand-stapled ’zines will be forgotten as soon as they are produced. Your friends will laugh at them at your funeral. Your hopes for immortality mean less than the knots in your noose.
Yes, I admire the tall trannies with glamorous coats
in the laundromat documentary
Yes, I admire the Ocean Queen
with her marijuana fire department
Solicit their opinions on your goulash.
Let your work die with you
—Jonathan Penton
“Regarding Your Career” was previously published in a different form in Antipatico