Harumph.

I haven't particularly impressed myself here, but I did it, so I pat myself on the back. I guess. Going to take maybe a month or so to edit these, see what I wanted to say in each one, and how many of them are actually somewhat original. Think it's DeLillo who talked about working your thoughts out in writing. So many of these poems are about a speaker searching for an identity somewhere, that I think it's apparent that I can look at the exercise as that--attempting to define some of my beliefs so that I might be able to define myself better without the use of judgement or your general Orientalism.

(97)
My identity
is ever shifting
and unstable

because of your presence
in the atmosphere
looming over me.

Like Jupiter's pull
on the asteroid belt
keeping it from planetizing

like the US's constant sway
in the Latin America
of the nineteenth century--

I don't know who I am
or who I want to be
and it's all your fault.


(98)
Newspaper headlines:
THE MAN WHO JAPED
about a college professor
who cut off the head of some statue
in Boston
as the revolutionary festivities started
getting it on.

It worked,
you know?
We are changing the world now
bloodlessly
but with lots of destruction.
I turn a page
in this hospital.

32-YEAR-OLD MAN
STOLEN AT BIRTH
LEARNS IDENTITY
It's getting better,
there's proof everywhere for that fact.
A noise--
someone tells me that I have a visitor.

God, I miss Tyler.


(99)
Squeeze the words out
like the quick way
of drying a sponge
and feed what I have to say
into your machine
so as to supply me
with the mirror that I've always wanted
and a sort of back cover synopsis
of who I am.

Or not.
Maybe that question is the point.
Man looks up at the sky
and he calls out
"Who am I?"
or
"Why are we here?"

And it doesn't matter
if there is anything up there
or if it is listening or not.
This person is thinking
or at least
this person believes
that he is thinking.

I think
sometimes
at least
that that's
plenty enough.


(100)
If god were alive today,
we clearly wouldn't recognize it,
and it'd probably hate all the technology.
The way I see it,
this deity
would make itself manifest in reflections
like the footsteps poem--
people looking at themselves and seeing another as well
one similar and different at the same time,
one absurdly beautiful.

All his evil beliefs aside,
Karl Marx was most wrong
in his anti-religious behavior
because as Burke said
"man is by nature a religious animal."
And I am just a writer
who delights in believing contradictions
like Rodó praising both Emerson and Poe
but we have to have some kind of
real truth to believe in.

Pseudoscience
stems from explaining
what we do not understand
with simple theories and axioms,
ideas like Occam's Razor,
and to the people who believed them,
the views made sense.
So what we understand to be true
is clearly just as fluid,
changing ever so swiftly

as bending down to pick up something you've dropped while you were out shopping on a rainy day and looking into a puddle and seeing that other face.