These My Exhortations
If I had the wherewithal, I would burn the notebook
in which I scribble images—city, river, sky—
ominous only to an ominous mind.
Ambiguity, I detest you! Your simultaneity is a fraud;
you require two or more moments to exist,
and then you make us the dupes of Time, and we put
our tongue to the diode to suck the weak pitiful sensation,
like eating a particular food once too often in a week
or coming for the third time in a day.
I’d like a giant typewriter, whose every key, when struck,
would leave by its one mechanical swat an entire poem
on the page. Then what prepositions, what predicates, even,
I could offer you; failing which, I’d be an enormous fly
in the lands of sugar cane.
—Matt Longabucco