And there’s only one feeling I want to express
Not one that people generally want to hear about
And I immediately wince in self-reproach
Speaking of people generally
What feeling pray would people want to hear about
Perhaps this fact as distinct from this idle declaration
Accounts for my impoverished ability to make an image
A defect that doesn’t make me not a poet
Just a poor one
And I hear a multitude shouting their endorsement of this claim
And why would I invent large-scale fictive derogation
Because it would be joy eternal
For a multitude to have perused these pages
Sufficiently to say that they suck

You can’t do just what you know and love
You have to do things that are onerous and unrewarding
Suppose I tried to express some other feeling
Like maybe the wonder one feels
Upon seeing a flower unfurl
Well I’ve never seen a flower unfurl except in a time-lapse film
That was pretty wondrous but what do I have to show for it
Some prosey unpunctuated sentences
Separated into arbitrary lines
Which I will publish to the internet
With all the others literally all
Since I pretend a point of pride
Not to pronounce an exclusionary judgment
Except that every instance pronounces judgment
Always the same that I am always wrong

If I had a narrative gift which I don’t but if I did
Perhaps I could treat of personal relationships
I and thou or at least I and them
Instead of this unrelieved I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

Never never praise yourself
As I silently just did for contriving an odd number
Of instances of the first-person pronoun
A number meaningful to me precisely in its meaninglessness
And simply meaningless to everybody else
Or rather anybody else who should encounter it
Which is virtually by definition nobody
Never never claim any knowledge
Never make any claim whatsoever
You would be wrong to call this a suicide note
But you wouldn’t be far wrong

The issue is
What is appropriate for these pages
Some wiseguy once said there is no outside-text
Maybe
But different texts are different
Even as they interpenetrate
I mean to say such might be the case
Since I dare not make an outright claim
In other texts I’m an enthusiastic person
Morally aware something of a humanitarian
And yet here I punish myself
As no being deserves to be punished
Though seen of none save him who
Well nobody really
And why here
Because here I must tell the truth
And who can discover the truth of the subjective world

To discover the truth of the objective world
One must enter into dialogue
And here there is nobody to talk to
Except the President of the Assembly
Secure within his portable bunker
That parasite
Who punishes disobedience
And thou Dear Reader
Silent Reader
Fantasy creature out of a song by the Dixie Cups

I am afraid to sin because I fear the consequences of sin
Admittedly no longer those of the loss of heaven and the pains of hell
And not consequence really but mere subsequence
Namely the punishment levied by the Tyrant
And there is really only one sin
Cowardice

Tell the truth
I know the truth
I don’t know the truth