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The Wisdom of Observed Omission



The less you have, the more you can believe in nothing.
The more you acknowledge, the less you can conceive of everything.
Why learn just to forget?  Why learn to forget?  Different is difficult.
Cruelty and love fracture in infinity.  Where the heart dwells
the mind cannot enter.  As it is in heaven.  The answers are in the questions.
When we know everything, will we value the fog, the struggle?
Will our nostalgia long for confusion, for uncertainty, a vogue for the vague?
For us, a circus for the curious, certain to cure us of circuitous intent?
Will we feel we conflated to care about with to care for,
everyone having said so much about everything that to listen at all
was to be lost?  To impose God is to deny God.  Invoiced by inches.
All clairvoyants are eunuchs (it doesn't necessarily work the other way),
magnets for irony, the flatteringest form of sincerity.
The stars are redeemed only by the space between them.

Everything is abstraction.  The concrete appears
only in certain limited perspectives. The epiphenomenal biome.
Playing with cliche is a cliche, and that's okay.
I half-mean what I say for what I say is half-true.
The philosophy of the phoneme, need expressed in word,
causes grouped in clauses, sentences sentencing without conviction,
dropping meaning from an unintelligible dirigible of linguiform feeling.
Or the damnable insincerity of hyperbole, of indecisive indecency,
of the poetry of those who deny poetry, of those who use the word
only to blaspheme against the word, in conflicts between preference
and necessity, purpose and perplexity, underrepresenting the sublyrical
supertext with the innumeracy to dare demand remuneration.
Who has time to hear what they say that they don't mean?
What part of aesthetics isn't compulsory?

Some dream better than they live.
Some live better than they dream.
The ones I don't understand are those who believe
you must stop loving to love again.
One for life is one for living.  Even living toward oblivion.
What is given by one is received by another.
What if everything responds, but too slowly?
You spend years discovering the details of your particular world,
then decades realizing you've no idea what to do with it.
Love or knowledge?  Choose carefully.
We are on no uncertain terms.
I want to know everything but your name,
to achieve everything but the goal,
to have everything but the offered thing.

All poems are written and copyrighted by Michael C. Rush.
None may be republished or repurposed without permission.