I don’t know how I write and for forty years
I have punished myself on that account
For when I lack a datum of knowledge
That I believe I should possess
I castigate myself and worse
And apply adverse criticism
Not to the work but to myself
The human in the background
Faulty and full of holes

One source of this belief is my prior commitment
To the myth of total self-control
And hence of total responsibility
But commitment to doctrine
Almost never turns out well
One thing to know right from wrong
Quite another to do right

Part of the problem is that I underwent
A lengthy formal education that required
A measure of self-control I never considered adequate
And so the outcome unsurprisingly
Was that I did not learn what I thought I should have learned
But I learned enough to know that I did not know
What I thought I should have known
Not that anyone would divulge what that was
My instructors really weren’t too helpful

And it doesn’t help now that I’ve chosen as my subject
Or did I
A question of know-how and continually drift
Into nostalgic torment concerning know-what
Or its lack
For example when I say that I don’t understand
How the verb to be works
I’m not talking about knowing how to do something
This problem exemplifies what I’ve called a datum
Simple objective fact
And I have long imagined
Wrongly
That Hugh is my brother and My brother is Hugh
Mean the same thing ignoring
The conventional sequence in English of topic and comment
And it is certain racial prejudice is like dark clouds
And not the other way around
Please don’t teach me friends and colleagues
What the true function of is is
I’m tired and I’m old and I want nothing new

I’d like to say I’ll drown my book
But I don’t have that kind of courage

We don’t choose to do the right or wrong thing
When we do wrong we have to convince ourselves
That what we know is wrong is somehow right
Unless we’re driven to do wrong by dire compulsion
Which still isn’t a choice

So
Prose that lacks punctuation but does display
Lines that fall short of the right-hand margin
But a variable meter I tell myself
Swingy contemporary rhythms I offer as defense
No I don’t know what I’m doing
And invocation of those great whom I regard as predecessors
Would be most unseemly
And it would overstate the case to say
That I have wasted my life
And how dare I scorn those who care about me
But these pages have paid off only modestly
And only in the coin of my own occasional bliss