This poem
is not out to get you.
These words—and their
uncertain-
looking
arrangement—
weren't devised
to trick you.
The spaces are here
to slow you
down.
The syntax, the rhythm;
they're to help
shore you up. Because
the fact is that—yes,
it's brutally true:
The World
doesn't owe you
a living. Nobody
out there
much cares
what you want.
Everyone who dies
stays dead,
and nothing
that's not alive
is capable
of even comprehending
your existence.
But the good news is:
you—yes
you, with your cute little
quirks, with all of your
weird anxieties,
lazy reveries, vain
fantasies;
your chronic overgeneralizing,
sickeningly perfection-
istic tendencies, and often
completely crippling paranoid delusions—
you
are not just some part
of a metaphor
you didn't make.
Never forget: if everyone else gets
to constitute
The World,
than so do you.
And you
know what?
That makes
The World
part of
your metaphor, too.
And that means—
as its maker,
as a dreamer, even
as The World's Least
Published,
most indolent poet—you
do not
owe it
one single
thing, either.
