8/2/90

Computers make it very clear- that
everything in life can be reduced to
a simple yes or no. Humans have
never stood for this. After centuries
of solemn obedience to the rules of language, we
created the yes that is no and the
no that is yes.
The linguistic birth of irony.

What makes a bit of "prose" into
"a poem." A concentrated form of
experience can be encapsulated
within the melodic possibilities of a single
idea.

We realize that these utterances
are a deft avoidance of the simple fact
that we are continuously waiting-
that is awaiting the tingles of creation. For years I
died, I was mortified in the disturbance of such waiting. I wrote and tore up
hundreds of poems, banged my fist against
a table, much as a lover, disappointed
that her partner does not meet her ideal
conception of a suitor, saturates herself
in martyred pathos for the
ironic disappointment of "unfulfilling love."
I criticized myself and reviled myself.
I mocked the poems themselves in other
poems, seeing their faces pass by me
in awful disappointment- that once it
had sailed long and hard in the
deep-sea currents of my enthusiasms. Now
if is an abandoned vessel, upon which
I heap my occasional and distracted scorn.