the world’s a poem
that doesn’t rhyme
it lacks a certain metric
or sense of time
the nature of the world
and how we interpret it
is not what it once was
the act of perception must now
be an act of writing not reading
when conceived as text
the world is an endless string
of signifieds with infinite
possibilities of meaning
so writing is more vital
more important than reading
reading is mere reification
of course we could blather on
in grandiose phrase of how
the world is out of joint
or even how we are out of place
in our interpreted world or
lament what man has made
of man but now in the dawn
of a new century we can
no longer turn to shakespeare
or rilke or even wordsworth
to help us find our way
through the artificial constructs
of the natural world around us
two hundred years ago
wordsworth wrote the harmony
of nature as a simple ballad
a style that might be
at home in an old church hymn
or country music song
and later turned to the ode
perhaps the most contrived
of all poetic forms to explore
his most contrived intimations
of his poetic immortality
now we can no longer see
what he once saw in nature
or in poetry for that matter
a godlike harmony and beauty
and while our world has perhaps
distanced itself even further
from wordsworth’s imagined
state of nature we must
recognize that his accounts
of early spring and daffodils
were always written from
the perspective of outside
observer as though he were
writing while looking out
his window or even at a painting
we can no longer write
wordsworth’s garden
that apple has already been bitten
and we now know that
it cannot be unbitten
if it were ever bitten at all
for nature outside of the artifice
of poetry is really nothing
but the perpetual exercise
of sex and violence
as evidenced here in early spring
amid the ubiquitous pollen
and ever-present signs of easter
and not to mention the kudzu
the dormant kudzu
that covers the world
like grey cobwebs
in a haunted attic
if there is harmony
it is a brutal harmony
wrought of our own writing
like the painting of a landscape