I’ve lost something and I can’t describe
what it is

and what if that’s my job
to say how empty an absence is



like rolling 2 gears together
and maybe teeth are missing in one
or both

or maybe trying to grind
two stones that are
polished and smoothed



I’ve always liked 
a little grit

but sand in my shoes
or in my hair

is like shattering
a glass in carpet
and using a broom to
get it out

I can’t describe
what it’s like to
sit on opposite ends
of a park bench and
not know how
to get any closer

I miss so many things
and I’ve looked through my piggy
bank and only found pennies

a pile of things that are
almost completely worthless

a shoebox full of sporks
a well with a bucket and a rope
that’s too short

sometimes in my room
it’s so dark that if I wake
up I won’t know if it’s morning or night

imagine being someplace you know
so well but are lost and don’t have any idea
how to get out

the rule is, put your right hand out
lay it on the wall, and follow

sometimes the rules don’t apply to all of us
I don’t want to sleep here again tonight

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us—that we
      do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—
   ball fan, the statistician—case after case
      could be cited did
      one wish it; nor is it valid
         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
   nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
      the imagination”—above
         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
   the raw material of poetry in
      all its rawness, and
      that which is on the other hand,
         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.