Three Spring Poems Written Rather Quickly

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1.

I’ve perhaps written enough for one person in one lifetime.

If someone were to read the entirety of my published works, depending on how fast they read, it would probably take them a few months. This seems to me a good amount of time to spend on a single author, because of course it is much more important to read many authors, as many as possible.

But of course I can’t stop. Can’t stop writing.

Will I write something in the future that is different or better than everything that came before?

And, if I do, will I or anyone else notice?

I don’t know if I ever really thought art was important. But I suspect there was once at least some small part of me that thought art was at least a little bit important.

However, in our current predicament, what seems important is: air, water, soil.

(Not necessarily in that order.)

(Not so much art.)

What seems important versus what I spend my time doing.

So many different shades of climate grief.

Will what I write in the future be any different than what I have written in the past?

Is there a future? (But this question is a dead end. We make the future one day at a time.)

What will I write today? / What will I write tomorrow?



2.

Poems.

I was young and wanted to write poems.

I thought poems would grab the reader by the throat and radiate all meaning that words and thoughts and feelings could contain.

But I did not want to write poemy poems. I wanted to get to the point. As sharply and precisely and quickly as possible.

I was young and wanted everything to happen now.

It was the eighties.

The eighties were already almost done.

I couldn’t find the poems I wanted to read so I wanted to write them myself.

And I did. So many fucking poems.

That were published. And read aloud at reading after reading.

And I learned that poems were almost nothing like what I had hoped for or thought possible.

They were something else.

And so was I.



3.

It is so easy to make meaningless art.

You don’t even have to realize you are doing so.



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