Whose voice gives agency to fragments of apprehension and memory…forming, arranging, connecting, unifying psychic criteria into a living whole of prose and prosody?

As one poet, Wallace Stevens, stated the question, who arranged this rendezvous?

One does not create poetry simply by possessing the will to do so, nor does one blunder into its numinous dominion by a swoon of enchantment.

One must be in love with the face and form of creation. To paraphrase Spinoza: Be drunk on God.

But not besotted with belief…aspiring to be some Infallible Pope of Bar Stool Logos…

Rather, to be able to make a a home in being lost…to recognize:

The homunculus of aspiration, lost as well, squatting amid the ruins of towering rage.

Granted, like you, homunculus, my prevailing sense of self has been besieged by contretemps and coincidence; even more like you, I am enraptured by the distraction.

Our kind…are dazzled by broken bits of the approving sun. Amassing solar shards the way bower birds shore glinting baubles, I’ve witnessed you bartering with penurious angels for a glimpse of the totality that caused their fall.

(What we won’t do for the buzz provided by primal grace. Although we carry Eden within us…knowing it is as provisional as paradise.)

Your need for recognition leaves you exhausted: At day’s end, you collapse upon sweat-sodden sheets, dreaming of your shit-dust empire…built from hoarded, moldering triumphs, the ash of incantatory wit, and the atrophied promises you made to your future self.

Your mind — such as it is — is an inhuman reflection cast by daemonic mirrors: You mistake the welter of fragmented drives and desires for the deathless dreams of numinous seeds.

Come morning, you negotiate your existence amid a city of visionary vermin and indifferent right angles; you drag your putrefying hopes down to the banks of Eternity’s burning river. There, you turn, face east, and mutter your desperate prayer of entitlement to the distracted dawn.

A filthy breeze rises from the river in reply.