Once, in purest poverty, I tried
to compose a poem with no design—
but words, those little mottled black-
and-white vagabond things,
each one starving
despite being swollen near to bursting
with unkillable sound, and all of them
greasy and threadbare,
sheathed in rumpled suits of their
hand-me-down significance—
they all kept on creeping
and scrambling back into the construction
with a desperation so relentless, so
astoundingly unbreakable
that I lost my will to kill them at all
and collapsed instead on a strategy
of control—with ambitions presently
only to spin such thick patterns
of this slack spongy population,
that any discerning reader
should figure—the craftsmanship here
transcends the material.
