A Return to the Poet’s Experiential World

If even a single, smallest aspect
Of existence were ever completed,

Nothing would happen. Nothing ever was.
That what we have is an unholy mess,

We have because it is deeply messy,
Messy because it is—nothing complete.

No line, no beginning, no end, no goal.
No cycle, no whole, no eternity.

Just a mess. Blurry, fluctuating mess
Full of partial circles and half returns,

Eruptions that seem to start things, pauses
That appear to bring some things to an end.

It’s a sloshing tub of waves, back and forth,
Except there’s no tub, only waves on waves,

Some of them sparkling, many of them dark,
None of them bounded except by others.

Why we can’t be content with this, why we
Yin, Yang, Origin, and Apocalypse,

Probably has something to with us
Being part of this mess that never rests.

I’ll be content with discontent today.
I know it’s out there. It won’t go away.

I’m weak joints stepping carefully across
Fractured basalt in flowering grasses

Littered with perpetually falling
Pine cones and a few pieces of plastic

Trash fallen from the lives of such tourists
As also hiked here, then never returned.