the archivist

[sweetwater]

as interesting photographs of words
in the poetry department of raw images
a lexicon or lexography
even to say a photographilia of time spent

in that it matters most
what gives one pleasure
to appease the senses

like a poem in the absence of metaphors
like a leafless tree
or waterless brook in a river
of fish with two heads

and a waterlung
to filter out the tar

it writes itself
in that
it does not matter

even to you
to take the benefit of the doubt
in the wonders of me

to say

that what matters most
as some have said
oh great sage and poetic device

centuries to qualify the meaning
epochs of words

meaning in quotations

as if a single answer presumed
the entertainment of another

or the philosophy of being and becoming
is it the reader you have become
now on this line

are we not languaging even this moment now

or is the magistrate of sentencing
dictating the parameters
of good taste

or the flavour of an aesthetic moment
in your one's own self renowned semiotics
of discovery

and for this
as it is to represent
the meaning and aforementioned
taste to solve riddles
and win a million

...

what does it mean
to read
a story without plot
disfigured by the endless
persuasion of words

to enrapt in an oil cloth
for a fortnight
to stigmatize the wound to heal

or to bleed

or to elicit the response
of an error in judgement

to see another
more clearly than one can see oneself

or is it ... that we hide
and in our station and platform
the platitudes of our content

and recent ratification
of an accord
to not permit the licensing
of operators without proper
medical training in poetry

so as not to preclude
the supposition of doubt
or inflame the costume
of personality

in a canteen of vinegar
and to carry oneself
as if it mattered

though the idea and image
of posterity

has very little meaning
as retrospective