Each day a required task remains undone
And the mind can’t know what isn’t finished
So, the soul continues to feel alone
Unable to picture its own wishes
The eyes glaze over news from Washington
Vacations collect painted shells on sills
Getting out of bed demands volition
pills
I have nothing to make, no gallery
Yet I persist in calling myself art
Not the maker but the thing itself. Fear
Of the unstructured and unopposed—life
An interminable question—what if?
Poised where one thing ends and another starts
How attached I am to vague discontent
Here now the quality of obscurity
Remoteness of touch, blurred appearances
What this substance called fear-of-being is
A future of one’s own, without consent
Subject to fantasy, unhappiness
Nothing but the hollow empty feeling
Thinking of a chore more common than rent
A flaw no less appealing than money
O, the near rhyme of its proximity
It being something that cannot be told
Held like perplexity, as value
Phony, counterfeit, yet somehow principled
Reportage is such a nice word for it
I live in a fever dream astounded
Chewing on food without taste’s amusement
Listening to the sound of teeth touching
Wondering how the current is ground meat
It’s all a matter of my defenses
Reduced to hidden corners, crouching down
Off-kilter supported by meeting walls
The comfort of geometric limits
*
I am finished with the life of the mind
The life itself cured me of that ailment
One many revolutions of a wheel
Invisible hamster-like progressions
The length of time remains fruitlessly still
Marching to war against dull wrung senses
Downward motion is stirring to the soul
Disorder as tight circular returns
The ground rises to meet the level eyes
Swirling the oval tilts back in laughter
Leaden with gravity and goalless effort
Dying is the only verb called for here
Summoning the bored creaking mechanism
Summing up the biomechanical
Crying becomes analog for glisten
Shiny, repetitious, strung pearl globules
Linked all together as varicose veins
Age, knowledge and yearning in a sentence
Finding in, the preposition pointing
A circle either makes itself or not
For in the work of searching I am found
Cast, melted or molded as fashion
Crafted with timely details, edges round
Sought after, but not caressed in order
Spun from one gain to another decrease
Roundness, I, not perfectly circular
But many-studded, a devious hat
Lifted off the steaming head—wintry
*
Its line follows a path of discontent
Leading around avoiding all corners
Goes to one of four burners, pilot lit
Pots and pans rest on the cooking surface
All encircles the hot morning habit
Repeatedly returning the purpose
Sunshine, news, morbid depression, fretting
Heat off the rippling surface steaming face
Stultified and incredulous
Two words appropriate to depression
In their specificity of purpose
They are both proper to the condition
Is this the poem or the mood I write?
The difference between thought and feeling
Must I choose among senses, sound or sight?
As if one is more proper to being
Not perfect still I am found in spirit
Submerged permeated contained infused
Alternately both agent and subject
The two being the same, it’s confusing
All existing prepositional it
Increasing knowledge dispels delusion
Is mysticism a refuge or retreat?
Letting go of all facile solutions
*
Divine impulses hold fascination
As the poet crafts his own vehicle
Aesthetic judgments rhyme with sensation
They investigate what’s empirical
Meter is the order of creation
A numerical system beneath all
Life’s a gradual accumulation
Adding up to the inevitable
Cliché is the future of all poems
Words exert no mastery over will
Poems explore every condition
Physical, political, mystical
They confound reason with core emotions
They expand what we think is reasonable
But the chief purpose is not expression
The purpose is simple—fundamental
Writing constructs a girding suspension
Fixing holding supporting encircles
Catches the present for recollections
Turns experience into little pills
Imaginary reports that surround
The spatial configurations of illness
Unlocatable origins of sound
The theory as substance of belief
Talking about forms and how thoughts subtend
How bracts extend underneath their petals
Finding the point of a line, touching the ground
Letting go of sense, relieved of power
Contemplate the oval in its roundness
To conceive of nothing, forget the hour
*
Let’s make ‘I am here’ the sole proponent
Lose control. Rise up to fall down
How to talk about circularity?
A question arises about language
The names we have don’t match appearances
Who’s to tell what one does to another?
And how does one make the damn topic rhyme?
Trust no scheme with any fidelity
I’m bored, fatigued, I have too much baggage
The frames we use don’t catch the nuances
I’m through with description—why bother?
I’m getting older, running out of time
No more interest in identity
What is perception? What’s reality?
To be in the world and not of the world
I recall that Lenin instructed that
O, to be done with collecting these pearls
Sayings and maxims, masters long deceased
Deeply alienated from this world
And there is no outside from which to judge
This is about prepositions and roles
About how we connect object to object
The way behavior swings between two poles
And how we remain in constant discomfort
We exist inside something enfolded
Knowing ourselves only through habit
Through prepositions we move things, get fed
Survive by actions conjoined with projects
We move in circles until we are dead
Leaving memories and a few effects
The ear moves between the world and the dead
Here each line describes this trajectory
Transcribing views from within an ellipse
Testifying to the hazy border
I’m trying to get beyond this crisis
To make some sense of my fractured order
With words find meaningful ways to exist
Be all elements, earth fire air water
Trying to render language matter
Daily I touch the creative process
There is no purpose or reason to persist
The aim is to get beyond bitterness
Because the house of reason collapsed
And we were all present bearing witness
We are reliving matters of the past
Confusing present and future tenses
