Increasingly, American cities are utilitarian rather than aspirational.
Increasingly, I long to be somewhere else.
The self and the nether as we struggle otherward.
If I define myself as one who won't allow others to define me.
Or if I am the mean, me, of my ancestors' ancestors
and my descendants' descendants.
Done is a decision.  I considered it—of course I did.
That rejection has my thoughtprints all over it.
Is the significant sufficient?  Never confuse inevitable for good.

Would I even do it if I had to do it differently than I do it?
Come see my collection of errors and delusions—
what a display they make!  If those around you aren't normal,
then normal isn't normal and you are pulled weirdward.
Do they never tire of recycling what they hear, what they've heard?
Of never composing an original word?
Read Jude the Obscure.  Read A Confederacy of Dunces.
Read Something Happened.  Read The Sea, The Sea.
Read One Hundred Years of Solitude.

My alarm clock sits on a copy of Stephenson's Anathem.
(It doesn't:  I'm taking liberties.)
What we portray in poetry is serious play.
We would have greatness in excess if we weren't so
quick to slap a price tag on everything:
we diminish ourselves by stressing cost over value.
The thing we can never come to terms with is how unlikely we are.
(I can't abide a euphemism, which is nothing but an attempt
to deny what is, to deny our capacity to face what is.)

The problem is misunderstanding.
The problem is those who misunderstand, starting with me.
You can kill a guy just by restricting his interactions.
When a hard poet tries to be tender,
when a tender poet tries to be hard—
if you only understood the point I was trying to make!
So many of our assumptions are not only wrong but ridiculous.
It may be that the biggest improvement to our conclusions
might come from a careful examination of our assumptions.

Let us go down, and there confound their language.
Do not approach me with an impoverished worldview,
a narrow understanding.  Go big, include everything,
layer details, complexities.  Define your terms, first thing.
I want to affirm my ideas, or alter them.
But some I must sustain unvalidated.
Nothing would be funny if we couldn't forget how horrible it is;
nothing could be horrible if we didn't forget how funny it is.
The very nature of memory predisposes us

to view our relationship to thing in terms of possession.
Just imagine, I might have one day walked away from what I had
if what I had hadn't left me first.
It took a while, but now I usually recognize delusion.
The trick is to make us love something
before revealing how it is compromised, where it is rotten.
Do not view me through your condolenses.
The best ending would be for all we take with us
to be the words we said to others.

         I stand nude in a blizzard,
         bundled on the beach:
         I am poorly prepared
         for dealing with my body.

         I don't love the past the way you do,
         but I love the past.
         And I (still) love the future:
         do you?  Do you?  Do you?