The Deep Mediocrity of So Many of us Poets

This man is writing with water on the warm Beijing pavement. I don't know if he is a poet. I don't know if he is a good poet. Perhaps he is just a calligrapher. One thing is certain. Whatever he was writing disappeared before he finished it. A fine idea for us bad poets. We pour our hearts into what we fondly imagine to be either soaring beauty or harrowing ugliness, then we either stand up and read it at a gathering of poets or we e-mail it to people who have learned to delete it without even opening it. It would be better if we went down to the mall parking lot and wrote with water. We could convince ourselves and perhaps others, that what we wrote was either too beautiful or too subversive to last more than a fleeting moment.