When You Got It

Varieties of you can so befuddle and befutz

the whole of – is it you? – that awkward fraught

mélange of alien conditions for exactly none

of which you’ve found a single explanation, felt

a helpful intuition or were able even farcically

to give a silly definition that might make you laugh.

It’s tedious to care about what’s you, or isn’t,

if the fizz of seeing, being, smelling, feeling

and the rest are at or near the best of their distracting

powers (no need to do it then!): but when the toxic

showers of your mental weather storm at you

and drive the least belief in cosmic order out of you,

who knows what pours down on you then?

Or what sprouts up from you like fungus?

For example when that far-from-wondrous

sorry-looking fellow popped up from your knee –

that busybody who before would sway between

your ankle or your balls, which in the former case

would trip you up and make you fall and in the latter

cause an ache so awful it would give you palsy,

make you shake and tremble like a square of lemon

jello in an earthquake, wreck your psychic landscape

so that what had at the moment seemed in you

(whatever “you” could mean) most urgently to need

some praise had now entirely escaped your memory,

and you’d no reason you could think of to go on.

And there it was again, this spawn of the unnameable,
not speaking, merely gazing at you, as if grazing

on you like an ass eats grass (do asses eat grasses?),

in this case merely sniffing it and finding it and you

about as palatable as the other kind of ass. But by this

time you’d have become a mountain of new shapes –

and wondrously begun again to think of fun.

Not having fun but being it. And you remembered

what in you had called out urgently for praise.

Then you forgot it. That was when you got it.

.