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.
