I will be the next poet laureate of New Jersey, because of the wild, incendiary yet fluffy poem at the end of this column.

It's not that I am the best poet in New Jersey, nor even that I am allowed to write poetry here anymore, nor that I didn't once get beaten up for trying to rhyme "chrysanthemum" with "Admiral Stockdale."

But I can save New Jersey from its current poet laureate with a poem that is not only poisonous enough to kill battle-tested Marines, but also rather sweet.

First, some background. The Legislature created the position of state poet laureate in April 2000. For the first two-year term, we had Gerald Stern, who has written about such things as road kill. Nice fellow. Never gave us a day of trouble. But when his term ran out, the state Council for the Humanities last summer appointed Amiri Baraka, who had first become famous under the name LeRoi Jones.

Known for caustic plays and poems about racism, Baraka spent much of his salad days telling white people that perhaps they should seriously consider dropping dead in front of him. He may have mellowed since then. But even he found this appointment weird.

"I told the governor when he appointed me, 'You're going to catch hell for this,'" Baraka told the Associated Press. "He said, 'I don't care.'"

Actually, the legislation that created the position of poet laureate didn't give the governor power to block the appointment anyway. Still, one can imagine Gov. McGreevey drawing himself up and saying that, by gosh, he would stand up for the weird radical dude. Everyone wants to be a big, buffed civil libertarian, until they see what kind of a mess it makes.

That mess hit the fan on Sept. 19, when Baraka treated a poetry festival audience to "Somebody Blew Up America," a year-old poem in which he implied that various world leaders knew the World Trade Center would be attacked. The trouble came late in the poem, when he repeated a now famous non-fact: "Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?"

It is worth reviewing why this patch of slander is so idiotic: In the last census, 21,266 of New York City's 8 million residents listed their ancestry as at least partly Israeli. Presumably, the number who are Israeli-born is smaller. But just for fun, let's assume that a fifth of all Israelis in town (and 4 percent of all Israelis in America) happened to work in the same two buildings.

That would mean they constituted 8 percent of the 50,000 people who worked at the Twin Towers. Since most other employees there were Americans, that doesn't leave much room for the 80 or 90 other nationalities represented. And probably the most common type of foreigner would not have come from the small, faraway state of Israel, but from our old friends Canada, Britain and Latin America. Shortly after Sept. 11, The Straits Times of Singapore reported that three Canadians, 100 Britons and 19 Mexicans were confirmed dead in the attacks.

Also, oops, two Israelis were on planes that were hijacked, and at least one has been confirmed dead in the Twin Towers – a number that seems comparable to Israel's relative size. Or maybe these three people just never got their copies of the Zionist Banking Conspiracy Newsletter. Someone in the circulation department is so busted.

In conclusion, we don't want someone as reckless as Baraka steering poetry's ship of state. But we also don't want someone who's overly nice. What's the point of fighting for free speech, when all someone is saying is, "Love is like ice cream, only sweeter!" The next poet laureate will be criticized for having any kind of an edge, or not having enough of one. We need a writer who appears brave, yet causes no harm, much as I do in my poem, which is bound to offend absolutely everyone except, of course, you.

Unfortunately, I have blathered on for so long in this column that I won't have time for the poem itself. But that was my plan, really – to promise an explosive, antagonistic poem, then not deliver it. That's the only way not to upset anyone. (And if I insert this one last parenthetical remark, I'll have no space left at all. There. Perfect.)

It won't be the first time I make people happy by not writing anything.