elimination

as i clean my apartment,
rumination or is it
meditation since I count my breaths
or is it rumitation...

i dig through old college notebooks
and think about who i have been
reading old lines where
there is no beauty to me it seems
just myself and reality
both ugly

even still, a kicking regret
in my shoulders and neck
tight like a moving van
thinking those lines
could have at least been less lazy.
could i have not been a worse realist?

even after some minor notion
of empathy had begun to take hold,
the mememe and the themthemthem
still were platitudinous and farfarfar too
desultory

now filed away under to-do
i wonder what it would mean
to just throw it all away
nopenoway...too cliché

 
 

Final Draft

Even if that noble truth (be it either),
love, should perish and be vanquished to
hell, I would follow that which I love,

For more noble, or so it now seems,
truth shall neither vanquish love nor commit it
to perish but strengthen those ties to bond, so...

Burden be gone, and shed concrete feet not
on thy way to the abyss, but leave truth and
love to shine the world's reflection from its glass face,

Because the world reflects more brightly when
love and truth trade favored glances and flirt neither
with should-not-be nor cannot-happen,

And skirting this danger, they alight softly to
conceive, moult through instars, then pupate in the
crevice of a pine cone, until the final imaginal stage:

A ruddy moth emerges to find itself sealed in a
plastic bag, flitting in frustration, only to be released
to wild the open night, far away from home

but free.