For Ryan

Sipping my evening chai in the now-brilliantly-silent sitting room, I pick up an old copy of Poetry magazine, a castoff I fished out of the co-op free box years back. I come across Billy Collins' selection standards for Best American Poetry 2006, a frank criteria that seems inoffensive--if not particularly inventive--until I come across the death blow: "no poems containing the word cicada." This with a freshly minted piece on my bedside which opens "Cicadas kamikaze down/ the torn screen door." And even though I realize that my hastily scribbled sketch isn't destined for Collins' desk, or any desk other than my own, and even though (or perhaps precisely because) I realize that my use of "cicada" is occasioned by the very notion Billy Collins opposes--poets choosing words on mouthfeel alone--I take a train to Billy Collins' house and kill him. Not with any relish, mind you. I just dispose of him quickly with a swipe of my Uncle Mack's butterfly knife and head back to the train station, where the urgent song of a perfectly-placed cicada swarm cleanses my thoughts.