There are those who would make of poetry
just another social network—fie on them
with their spastic nanoboundaries and their
needy fiefdoms, their egoclectic particularities!
Poetics is not politics! Everyone parties together!
Those deforming demands to conform
in separation are a noise in my ear.

I come to poetry to move away from clustering crowds
buzzing in love with their shared specificities, to hear myself,
alone, to map the unilateral deviations of my pattern,
not to converse with insecure subsets that recreate
the worldly games of hierarchy in words again.