Watching You Watching Me Watch the Wheels

My friend’s book creates a mythology of himself
and the persona. It’s a shit ton of poems and they are
all good, another friend says. I am humbled, we say.

Here on the cusps of the next set of poems, we flounder—
stuck in the gut by our ideas of what we should be.
We question each other’s fearlessness or lack of knowing

exactly what must be written. One day a friend says, you’re not
doing it anymore. You’re doing everything else to avoid it.
He may have been right, but if so then how could I know?

We can always dance, I say. It’s not the season for it,
he says to me in fatal seriousness. I have thought since then
about my relation to these words. I need an ear to write to.

Jack is dead. Amanda’s living. Victor’s dead. Stacey’s living.
Groucho’s dead. Paul is living. I am standing on the steps
of the official hall of records. I have just declared myself

a poet. I have pulled my gut off the hook and hung it there
for later. I know how to move the language but I forget how
to do it honest. Don’t try to write poems, I say to myself.