? perspective

perspective

That which breaks a prison out of her eyes.
At once beautiful and distant, like climbing eight thousand.
A clever impostor it demands
that effort, yet there is no walkaround
to where our parallels meet.

Lied to in abstract desert,
lost in abstract jungle,
we see eye to eye.

constraints

constraints

So many the variables glow over Sisyphus,
indiscernible letters on black screen.
He is a machine
that eats molecules of sense, and there is enough
to push the boulder up,
but not enough
and the boulder backtracks,
up toward the fixpoint,
and the boulder retracts to the everlasting
distance from Summit.

The meanings are defined
in the fixpoints.
But our daily iterations
remain
undecidable.

? [this sentence]

***

This sentence is first.
This sentence is false.
This sentence is self-referential.
This sentence is meaningful.
This is a bunch of true sentences.
This sentence contains the word "unicorn" in quotes.
This sentence is boring.
This sentence is last.

? close reading

close reading

"Close reading" describes a need.
A need to understand is what reading
responds to, but "need" brings something
emotional, deeper, singled out.
The poem describes writing a poem
in a restaurant, but we know this is just
a metaphor. Is it metapoetic? Not really,
because the poem is not about
reading a poem, scare quotes.
It is not a good poem, it is not a good reader,
who cannot spin double, triple meanings
around each word, picture images line by line.
But close reading is not about a grand picture.
It is laying out the words, kindling expectations.
It goes back to the text, back to the text.