Pretend, for a moment, this poem
is a spectacular cat gif, and you like it.
You like it very much. You like
your liking it, and you share or reblog,
perhaps you’ll even tweet, instagram, or vine;
you’ll repost in every imaginable
format and your friends will follow
and follow, like and like,
to the extent that this
spectacular cat gif, which is not
really a spectacular cat gif,
but a poem, will go
absofuckinglutely viral. This will
all be very good for me and my cat,
who co-writes most of my poetry,
as we will instantly be known
as the greatest (in this moment)
producers of poems disguised
as spectacular cat gifs
on the entire world wide web.
Some will say that we have
broken the internet and that
will also be good for me and my cat.
It has been our design all along.
Finally, we will have our dominion
over the very short attention spans
of internet users far and wide
and our poems disguised as
spectacular cat gifs will become
the stuff of legend for as long
as it takes to view a single cycle of this
spectacular gif.
michael jarmer 