OK here's a few more short poems.
Which I should tell you just briefly what the circumstances
were when I wrote them.
They're short, they're topical, they're totally disposable
poems, I'm sure.
And I wrote them about a year, year and a half ago,
I was living on a community in Southern Vermont.
And it was one of those things where we'd all
been talking it seemed like incessantly for weeks
and months about this, that and the other thing
and doing all kinds of stuff together.
And it was just about impossible not to take everything
seriously, which is horrible.
And we'd all agree to disagree permanently and irrevocably on
about everything and we're still living together.
And then one day when in the spring,
I just felt like it was so much stuff
I just wanted to just spit it out get it off my chest
and I found myself suddenly writing poems
about almost everything we'd ever talked about there.
And not being in favor of anything
or disfavor of anything so much as just being grouchy about it
all.
This is one called "Bifocal."
"Perhaps to marry once and for all
is like welding yourself to the deck of a ship
you enjoyed a trip on once.
But to refuse any marriage whatsoever,
is like a bird not flying, refusing
the support of the air."