Empty Day Almost Spent

There’s another moment
When you imagine it,
Whatever it might be,

That a moment ago
You thought you had, slipping,
This next moment, away—

And something in you cries
Out to the rest of you—
Waste! Whatever thing good

Or indifferent you have
Been doing distracted
You from what you have been

Losing while doing it.
And what you had’s going,
Your surplus dissolving,

Its dissolution waste.
You won’t regret it long.
You regret so little

That’s gone, once it’s long gone,
But right now it seems like
Something’s going to waste—

Free day, free afternoon,
What disappears without
Being consciously spent.

So that’s another form
Of it, isn’t it, waste?
But still you don’t know

What the word’s all about
How it functions, connects
To feeling it as waste.

The emptier the hour
Promised to be, the more
You hungered to feel it,

All the way through it all.
The closer to nothing
Nothing much feels, the less

You will jolt to the loss
Of near nothing at all
To near nothing at all.