Author most recently

As the author most recently

of copious notes: a discontinuity in several thousand parts

I can safely say

uncertainty is my only certainty,

other than an almost tantric ability to evade a climax.

It is not that my mind is empty;

it buzzes like tinnitus with big ideas.

But progress anxiety is rife.

Ideas are microbial,

but mine attack my creative flora instead of nourishing it.

They get in the way,

set up fiendish roadblocks

and interrogate their compatriots.

They are unwilling to bond

or to reproduce like multiplying cells.

Instead, they remain sluggish,

confounding me with their dissimilarity,

their inability to make friends.

They are incapable of forming themselves into sentences,

let alone paragraphs and chapters.

It is as though odd pieces of three or four jigsaws

have been thrown together in one crumpled box—

the one with tumbleweeds blowing across the desert on the lid.

No wonder they have nothing in common

other than an abject failure to form a single picture.

It is not that I feel incapable of articulating my thoughts,

or that I am filled with self-doubt,

although I am;

it is rather that everything has already been said

in ways more persuasive and by minds more talented.

As you can see, it is not that I have nothing to say,

but even after dividing what is left of my thoughts

into short, manageable paragraphs

this book has become an ocean uncharted;

a mountain unscalable; a canyon impassable.

Every choice is an infinite expanse of possibilities;

every decision so complex it hurts me to make it.

In reverse alchemy, I transform cut diamonds into mouse droppings,

sharpen ideas into brittle points like pencil lead,

splinter them on contact with the empty page.

My ideas are like the dust that settles on a spider’s web:

breathe and it all blows away.

There is no rapture, only apprehension;

no mystical illumination, only mundane incomprehension;

in a reality limited by me.

So if ordering my thoughts rather than thinking them

is my Big Problem,

instead of letting it consume me
I should give up and write a poem.

Any ideas?

—0O0—