Sheer childish foolishness
Last week it was my birthday again
and so I decided, as a celebration,
to spend some time revisiting
a few old poems I had written;
which must have been as selfish
as I could afford to be just then.
My saving grace was not on view there. While
at times I could almost believe I saw,
by way of the poem I had before me,
back into the me before I’d fixed on
that particular poem’s ending; could touch
each patched-up place where, in a hurry
to cough up the stanza and spit out its taste,
said self had drawn too many broken lines from
unformed thoughts like runny gruel; still,
at best, once I’d ripped out the ugliest
stitches, and patiently started to copy over
the pattern, my needlework might come
to seem less ‘rainbow puddle of oil spreading,’
more ‘series of postcards from the trail,’ though leading
no further out of mind than any chin, a stream of drool,
or water down the wrong pipe... until at last, one must
admit defeat; for in this game without a rule,
the only way to know enough to play is to have lost.
