A retreat from certainty doesn't
have to be an advance on chaos
if one knows where to bivouac,
taking delight directly in things, the things
that people have imagined and made real,
or in devising ways to separate from them,
contravening the conventions of conversation,
the revelatory perversion of irony persecuting
accident mistaken for inevitability, happiest
swimming and drowning in connotation
when we don't appreciate its pathology, our correlates
too proximal (the most artificial thing is a hierarchy),
adversarial or combinatorial, oversight or observation
reverse-engineering reality, relationships,
to list implicit assumptions with erroneous honesty
striving for accuracy while incorporating renunciation
of some of the extraneous (but what is necessary?),
a generosity of interpretation obsessed with the unperceived,
the sur-unreal, the trite parameters of invention,
innumerable opportunities presuming to exhume the future,
the hidden, the hideous, according to the evitable criteria,
the pose of expertise as a corrective to excess,
the negotiation of disadvantage, of what is said, what
doesn't register, what isn't remembered, what is
misremembered (remembering feels a little like learning,
like a little learning), pronouns getting ever vaguer,
the diluted power of a renaming yet makes, yet erodes,
new shapes of meaning, putative computations, the artifact
of art-in-fiction, admiring the self-defined, the self-defiled
(phenomenon or specimen?) over those practicing paleologism
to corrupt the vulgar to nicety, to behavior unbecoming to the robust
but a lot less fuss.

There are interesting things that no one has time to notice
evaluating category errors: the subtlety of some lessons,
minority interpretations, the part of assessment that isn't calculation,
essential waste, strangled and shoved into categories too narrow,
wrapped and bound by labels too broad, trivia-addled, no essence
to harvest upon release, prematurely preternatural,
no harvesters, either. What we laugh at is inadequacy.
For other peoples' myths, other people's legends,
to be of any use to you, you must become, a little,
those other people (penalizing acknowledgment of the exotic
is another way to reject the exotic). Though sympathy-stricken,
resist the gist of the obscurantist, blander blather,
a mutual pretense of false importance, the insult of insistence,
a disturbance in the of course, the contagion of custom,
childish admonishments against what we require of desire,
a dishonest honor, a redundancy of mind, a lack of confidence
to override conviction, inspirational delusion, the magicalcification
of reason infected with inflection, the effrontery of the upseller,
a diffident deference to those occasions when conception
doesn't lead to comprehension.

There is much we should acknowledge
but not accept.