Yesterday, I tried to compose myself. Say it
With me. Yesterday I tried to compose
Myself. Now, who succeeded, you or me?
Call and reader-response poetry, you see.
There was a time a concrete poem could be
Made of unintelligible sounds, and poems
About stuff, about subjects, could be
Concrete. Fair enough. I heard a poem die
Once, while I buzzed. Help me. Help me!
I meant to cry, but I was too tiny, too unlike
I. The grass is brown with winter, brown
Itself with spotted age, ready to give way
To spring again. The worm is stirring
In the roots of the words that worms churn.
This passing patch holds more kinds
Of life competing and competing
By collaborating than words can betray
To the emperor of decay. Yesterday,
A grey sky in a local space, a child
With a cough and impetigo and earache
On the couch mainlining infectious shows,
And a late middle-aged man hardly capable
Of walking as it was, declining to help
The cries of the millions of small lives
Like his own, in his own, like him, in him,
The flies and worms, grass, leaves, dreams,
And microorganisms, declining. I tried,
He wrote, composing himself, lying, I tried.
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