20.

The natural world does great work in the defeat of meaning.
It just grows straight through neither vulgar nor sacrosanct——
suchness in action destroyed immediately by my utterance.

We are sad for no reason. We are sad because consciousness is an
obstruction. We are sad because we have favored the systems of
our own obliteration. We are sad because we are bad at endings.

I am bad at endings but resilient in goodbyes. I am sad
because I am the most selfish man alive. The egret
from before ignores me and so I make it symbolic.

Writing poems is a bratty thing to do. It inverts the order
of suffering. I weep for the dying bee because it is dying
my death preemptively. I weep for the fallen elm

because there is nothing I would have done to save it. The
language of the anthropocene is always in the first person
omniscient, but maybe solipsism isn't solely human error.

The river, also, only sees things one way.





22.

Québécois fires say bonjour/hi to the Manhattan skyline,
the sun a red medallion portentous in the amber smog.
Another wave of pandemic grievance.

Years now as parataxis. Short breaths of terror.
Gasps of incredulity. All of my memories
have turned sardonyx. My dreams to nightshades.

Fast and slippery hours like suckling pigs
squealing for milk and minutiae. It's hard
to not be dramatic, the particulates rife,

the water impregnable, our queens disrobed in a
straw man's siege. It feels almost narcissistic to
call it an ending. I couldn't fall asleep

for fear of falling asleep. A landscape so quiet
my heart counts its breathing. Every hiccup a
parallaxed eternity. Every shadow espionaged.

My doctor tells me it's pathos that's killing me.





25.

I have no interest in power
but I am not harmless, like the isopod
that slowly becomes the tongue of its host.

This is how most of my arguments begin,
irritable that the language has missed its mark.
I talk to myself unabashedly and with no other purpose

than to get the words in their best order.
To be successful I must be surrounded by the same indigenous plants
that I ignore. I understand Pessoa's heteronyms——it's much easier

than making friends in your thirties.
I find the logic of zuihitsu agreeable. I find the sea
turtles agreeable. The mango agreeable and the oyster agreeable

and the spirit-lilting pilsner agreeable.
I am obstreperous only when I am most human
by which I mean verbal by which I mean imperious.

I think I'll nap on this mountain of dung which, unlike me, is agreeable.