Someday

What does it mean,

to you, she asks?

This reading into

you always do?

I've been obsessed

with eternal return:

ever since I got stoned one day,

and convinced that I had been there

but before I did enough googling

to find a word for what I'd seen.

What does it mean?

Why the pursuit?

It doesn't mean anything,

but mind games,

and perhaps a little comfort

before I go to bed at night,

like warm milk and valerian root

or the prayers I would say as a boy

to that bearded thing

and the ritual that went with it,

to fight off imagined hordes

of crawling insects

swelling up from the basement

racing towards my bedroom

to swallow me up and drag me

back with them, the rustling crunch

beneath me.

Just a little bit

before we sleep--

we see them everywhere,

the patterns that we want to,

and dismiss the data that doesn't fit.

She's ok with neurons and chemistry;

I need this sacred geometry:

imagined circles

upon circles,

looping ever forward:

an expanding universe,

collapsing into itself

to expand again,

and so it goes.

I jump in memory time

in backward loops

like Billy Pilgrim

only more mundane.

I have no other worlds to visit,

no future mes to see.

Only this life,

stretching backwards behind me,

a string from my birth,

I gather up from time to time,

and visit different spots along the way.

But more than that,

the chance to live again,

this self same life,

but better

bit by bit,

a little better.

I want to make a contribution

to the canon,

and someday will,

given my midnight

thought experiments.

But problems arise,

as they are wont--

if I improve,

wouldn't everyone else,

with more to give

and more to see?

The mystics and visionaries,

the prophets and poets

and painters and saints?

I don't have enough

vision for poem,

or toughness for prose.

But someday,

when Plath and Sexton

haven't killed themselves,

when Kurt doesn't put the gun in his mouth,

when Fitzgerald doesn't drink himself to death,

when Hitler is nothing but a doddering old man

in threadbare pajamas muttering absurdities

to anyone who would listen (but no one does),

maybe then I'll find the poem inside,

give voice to it,

set it free.