Work Poem

I’m too broke to make the work
Or I don’t care enough about the work
To be as broke as I should let myself be
To have the time to make the work
I work too hard to make the work
Or my indolence is too great to take that pleasure
In the work that the work needs
Or once I arrive as a boat from sea
At the limits of my intelligence
I quail and put the work away
I do not push the work or
Push the work too hard
So the work becomes working
A tough dough, not play
That I want to have fun, to see
The delights of the world
With my eyes and drink wine and say
This is the work of the work
Let it relinquish me, tame
Monster, to roam freely among the delights of the world
That yet I travel too lightly, quaffing
The brine of forgetfulness, that I should stay
In some hermitage and let the work of the world
Be, for it circles fine
Without me, that the medium
Of the work is inauthentic and circumscribes
The world of works in false conceit,
Belt that begets its own limitations, that
I speak these words I call my ideas
But lack their commitments
That, gadfly I, delight to say
I am working on
I am working on, and the work
A boat tossed at sea
Never arrives.

No, these are not paradisiacal thoughts.
They do not befit
This situation, which is that of the garnet
In the anguish, the anguish
In the garnet, the cities
In the anguish, in the garnet
All correspondence, all array
And its open, raw, unlikely vitality.