Len Gurts Alone, Though

I could pull back veneer after veneer—
the “Who is it that told you that?”s—
fast costumes and castoff relief: a dress, a sexuality—
a line all the way back to one of the memorabilia wars—
stand on a corner and sell my aesthetic—
stand on a pole and still my ascetic;
and the my my mys of me could go
go go chiselling into the anatomy of nothing being at the bottom (where
would the poet come up? I hate this piece—it is really sickening to me;
but I am still here quite wrongly
and from this unlovable position will come my march). Fictions are, for me,
the only way to do it coherently: hide
behind creativity in missed premises;
throw out what you don’t want in a poetic character (mine is a cynic
today/a lot) then there is that emptiluminicity:
just about the end of a limb dragging an open shape across a tree
its face shouting at no one—charging at no one—perhaps
(none of it is about one singular thing—
law of identity or all equals all or it’s just the same thing or vice versa.
Pulling back layers and not taking them with you—
more you, less this;
and more consistently alone
but then everything else.

This is why I hated the piece then: it was all
a waste until this last bracket? But it demonstrates the stripping and the stripping—
the guff we preamble in—
then the bracketed nonsense more or less left behind. How experientially cute though
only. 2007 me would be baffled, my sickening
the only consistent layer maybe: insight, bro!).