In another town, people are being transformed
into statistics by bullets. A minute past, and there are enough:
an Important Issue.
Meanwhile, you are
hunched over your desk: A coincidence possible
only by virtue of this poem. How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses, a dilemma already said, yet you want it
asked by yourself, the throat from which it issues
an available difference. Meanwhile,
you hover like a ghost whose repetitious message
is frustration.
Always there are no words:
A statement that makes this poem
a contrivance, though not in the way all poems are unnatural,
also not in the way all poems wish
to call attention to themselves.
People are dying. People are
dead.
In time this would get to you, the mind choked
by diatribes, most of them sincere. By the time this gets to you
some other source of trouble would have
pressed its barrel
against your head,
an unwarranted metaphor
because it is metaphor. Not that you don’t deserve it, but that
you do deserve it. A kind of guilt that lets you fall
asleep: From where you’re not, yours is a why or a yes that goes unheard,
which is
how it should be: this judgment that implies an ethical imperative:
you must accede. The consequence
a button pried off a shirt by neglect,
which is to say constant
use, loosened from a world where you are bent
over your desk in a manner that’s not
even salacious, and you are thus convinced something
has to take place if it hasn’t just yet.
How to end this poem without
remorse, an easy echo
of its didactic overtones? With a question,
I suppose: notice how the phrase divorces utterance
and complicity,
a disavowal worth another poem, without it.
