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Page 5

Blank is my ambition. What fat poet
does not aspire (bank on it!)
to B lank?

And yet it is my duty as a poet
to destroy (or consume? or decorate? --
choose your weapon, er, metaphor)
blankness.

Or do I but recycle it, my words
(sweet nothings?) briefly shining, fading,
merging into the white background noise
of the next generation, a noise which,
decades later, is (like the noises now
of traffic, air conditioners and our own blood
beating in our ears) what is called "silence"?

(Am I shooting blanks at blankness?)

But in a noisy crowd facing a noisy crowd
(on a battle field or one emerging from plane
or train, the other there to greet), how often
and how quickly we've been able to disentangle
from the commotion (co-motion, for at our most
random, even in war, our lives are a moving
together) -- disentangle the eye-gleam
(tiny shine, tiny blankness), the hello ("hell",
and "O", one emptiness ending in another)
or aimed gun that reaches out its invisible vector
to meet our own.

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