Its Quarry (A Manifesto)

 

My life is not the source of poetry.
The things I do and think and feel each day
no matter how they sway me don't account
for what the art that seizes me

appears to want to say. Whatever the relation

my experience may have to it is so profoundly
incidental that it can't get in the way –
whatever runs this show won't let it.

The best thing I can do with circumstance

is to forget it. Which just as soon as pen
appropriates the page I do. If I imagine
I'm the point, I’m through. The bubble pops.

The whole thing stops.

What makes it go? I do not know.
The thing that speaks attends far less to me
than you. You are its quarry. I’m not sorry.








.