I have been trying
to figure out what to believe
for a decade or so,
when I realized that
I did not know
what I thought
about almost any
thing.
In that time,
I have crash coursed through
power and its biographies
history and its potability
art and its discontents
society and its schemes
psychology and its rubricons
philology and its portmantology
economics and its theosophy
government and its representations
literature and its narrowtivity
and poetry with its poetry.
I have gotten drunk
on the dark wine of success
on the dreary sea of rank
on the faulty liquor of value
in the dinghy corridor of service
at the crooked table of valor
and at the hands of those
who meant to use me
as rough cut pyrite.
What I know now
is the incompleteness of knowing
in the shaky hands of a gerund mind
always rolling shrinking dying sloughing caving
in and out and by and for and onto.
Action cannot be deified
or reified
no matter the preposition
or the proposition
or the prepossession
possessed in cognition
at arm's length or ears' breadth.
Thusly
I am here
for what it must not be said,
red and green and purple and soil and everblue,
naturally or otherwise,
we can therefore
slip between the punctuation
and love every minute
as if it were a second
chance for
a million years.
Roman Ryan 