You’re fog. You’re a psychoanalyst. You’re a cell,
a wilderness that knows to formulate the razor sharp
reckoning of night feeding, swimming in the abyss of
the lake with your tongue of grief and I look to your
future and the steps you have taken with tokenism, with
certainty. I find this stressful. I have taken to write
in detail about the snakes that meditate in the sun. Let
us wait, demonstrate a force for good. The day must
need repair. You navigate the game world. I consult the
gravitas of the day, the utility of humans, the function
of wildflowers. What do you know of the arithmetic? Of Jung
and the leaves of rubbish stumbling before you? Can
you fix that muck? Poet, I want to make the world better,
set you a task, reconfigure the aims of the world in
front of me. The phoenix burns us. I don’t want to think
of mindless conjecturing. All I see are problems worthy of
investigation. I want choice. Poet, what is pain, the subject
matter found in the atlas and the voiceless rabbit, the
rusty nail at the bottom of a bucket, the concept of suffering
branching out in seismic overdraft. The light has gone cold, chased
out. Random driftwood is found at the end of the sea.
I am waiting for the monster to eat me in the darkness.
The birds shriek in the backyard in need of the moonlight
that tours around the world. The shroud is inspired
where it meets the horizon. The sun bends in its despair
and I put it back together. It’s a strange continuity. Its
neurology is not working right. We must kill it. The rough
spark. Do you know what the appropriate response is?
To meet the braver, hypothetical. Look at the miserable
sharks. See how they ably count sheep in this hard life.
I admire the albatross keeper. I take the windswept eagle
sham, my common humanity, Adler’s school of thought,
the potential for power, the positioning of the elk’s turning
point, the function of nihilism lecturing to the milk-fed
vision of the universe within me. Tell the truth in your ignorance,
the poet tells me from his university, extracting laws, order
from energetic chaos. I am religious. I obtain functionality from
nature’s plant sap, unfurling the tragedy from the finite road
that knows its determining limits. I don’t know if you
have nerves, the capacity for bliss or joy, the character
that makes up the abstract me is something that is undefined.
To care for egoic self. Achebe, Soyinka are champions.
We push ourselves out against the world informed by the
unknown code in genes. I search for footprints in the river.
