Poem and the Nothing Ever After

when verbs to be are

reclining not even wanting

to work standing well away from the road

where no traffic moves and

an inconsistent hum comes

from somewhere sourceless

to complicate contemplation

a stillness longing into nothing

more and narrative stalled

stuttering to a stop so the

road’s servitude isn’t one any more

postmodernism slips into the reeds

covered in mud called courage and carrying

succulents for the unstable winter

and everything moves

an inhuman vibration or

responsive leafy listening verging

on an apocalypse of knowledge or

when the machines and plots

desist, it is what is left

blandly undefined and bushed

what is left is a rift—ahistorical

and clustered around a faint

filtering disorder called shelter;

you and I live there for years until

the wild men came with weapons—

after that no records were kept . . .

what is left is considered

faulty verse, a hack’s

ruinous reinvention of negative

culpability—‘git outta here

ya damn tree-hugger, damn

hippy—build something or die!’