The Death of Apollo

thus far shining Phoebus Apollo standing
at the gates of death let out a shout, just as
a singer cuts the dull hum of a feast
with a single word whipped against the lyre,
the prized possession of some long forgotten
fabled king or of some poor hermit
living alone in a deep mountain hovel;
the Muse infects him, and the music stains
the bare walls of festive minds with dumb
horror, so Apollo met death and lived.

At times, avant-garde poetry more than makes my head spin: sometimes it comes off as downright tedious. Self-reflexivity is all well and good, but in the end so many of these new poetic experiments take lyricism even beyond the most wildly nihilistic tendencies of poetics. I'm willing to acknowledge that cutting up generated text and re-arranging it is interesting, but that doesn't mean I want to read it.