Crazed, As Craquelure

“who knew how terrible was

wisdom when it knew itself useless”

Unlike wordless song or dance,

Poetry can only be

Art humans evaluate,

Unless you believe gods think.

This kills me. This just kills me.

Sometimes, I wish for the rise

Of the robots, ones who read,

Or for words that read themselves.

Mostly, I try not to think,

Not to think too much myself,

How poems could only matter

To one trivial species.

Other poets enlarge this,

Either by giving us gods

Or making us half the world,

Architects, foes of Nature.

Some pretend we’re the whole show,

Human wars, human villains,

Human victims, human sins,

Revolutions, redemptions,

Players, stages, audience,

The whole black-box theater,

Self-sustaining as the globe

Floating through the night outside.

Then, all our names and costumes—

Tiny, symbolic details

Used to tell ourselves apart

In our masks and our makeups,

Uniforms for teams and tribes—

Our winks for audiences,

Whispered asides, cutting eyes—

Lend the poems significance.

This was my experience.

Perhaps it was also yours.

Never forgive who did this.

Never forget it was us.

Some poems aren’t human enough,

Their humanity’s blurry,

Indistinct, hard to label,

Too vague to identify.

I think I’m in there, somewhere,

Possible therianthrope

Outline under minerals,

Smeared, cracked, and calcifying,

Hard to make out, not quite right.

Do you know that weird torture

American teenagers

Were sometimes made to suffer

To keep them from casually

Screwing each other, the game

In which each teen was given

A raw, thin-shelled chicken egg

They were required to carry

With them everywhere, always,

For a set amount of time,

A week, maybe a fortnight,

Without breaking the damned thing,

Just so they would learn how tough

It is to care for something

As frail as a baby’s skull?

Unsurprisingly, research

Suggests it had no effect,

Didn’t stop kids from screwing,

Didn’t make kids good parents,

Was briefly crazy making,

That’s all, scared one’s egg would crack.

Imagine an actual 

Body, your body, that egg,

Which you will have to carry

Around with you forever,

For as long as you are you,

At least, probably longer.

That’s the body of this poem,

Bad pottery, badly glazed,

Egg-white pigmented rock art,

Encrusted, fading with age,

Carefully carried around,

Keeper of all the ashes

Any misstep could scatter

As any misstep could break.

However named or renamed,

It’s always this fragile shell,

Delicate, crazy-making,

No name can ever remake.