A Poet’s License
A Poet’s License The poet is the only licensed arsonist permitted to set fire to the furniture of the gods and call it interior decorating. We may say anything. Anything. The president is a traitor. The emperor’s new clothes are on back order. Your founding father was a pompous little prick with a powdered wig and a serious constipation problem. Put it in prose and they call it libel. Put it in verse and suddenly you’re a national treasure. Such is the magic of metaphor, that silk-lined getaway car for the criminally articulate. We take the great and good, those self-inflated blimps of sanctimony, and give them the pinprick of a well-placed adjective. Pop. There goes the pedestal. There goes the marble. There goes the solemn little statue of a soul who mistook applause for immortality. Irreverence is not a lack of respect. It is respect refusing to kneel before an overdecorated idiot. And if the truth must wear a flower in its lapel to get past the doorman, then hand me the fucking bou...
