On My Decision to Retire as a Poet

You say I should hang up my quill.

Everyone’s grandma

& her dog are posting poems.

It’s not the grandmothers

I’m concerned about, their

odes to larks & scones—

it’s these drooling

sons-of-bitches; their ghazals,

villanelles—to a flea-filled

water dish;

the couplets on their

human's forlorn crocs,

laced with bites & upchuck

since he passed; the plop of meat

from a can, its rings from tin

chiselled in its jelly,

like some avant piece

of shit at the Guggenheim.

Competition from the grandmas

I can handle. They’re forever

out of sync, think Facebook’s

still a thing, talk about their emails

like it’s 1996. Their use of LOL

that screams Hugh Grant on

Betamax. Even the Amish cringe.

But the mutts

are cutting edge, think of

Elon Musk as Obadiah, unhinged

upon his parchment, scrolled like

Gertrude's curls,

every psalm they bark

pushing bounds like San Andreas.

You tell me novelists have it

worse. Everyone’s nephew

& chinchilla

looking to become the next

Fitzgerald. And nothing can gut

a reader more than

a Spanish-speaking

gerbil, locked in its sawdust-

brig—going nowhere on his wheel

for what feels like eternity;

Rover peering in

just for the fodder, scrawling madly

like some slobbering

Ezra Pound ahead of his time.

Andreas Gripp

December 12, 2025

RF Photo