JOURNAL ENTRIES
Poems
If at All
It isn’t simple.
It is all very complicated. Nothing
ever changes that, no degree of understanding
or sophistication, the green hills and
barren deserts by which we stumbled our way
here bleeding and unabsolved, burdened
with images: recalled later they explain
nothing, fit no algorithm, give rise to
no principle, and can only be expressed
in words unredeeming; we
store them up one by one then struggle
to write these lines that some one or two
may say what was meant, uncertain
what it is, or if anyone can ever
know. Nothing ever changes that—
no amount of time or reason,
no experience or wisdom: whatever
we know, we know unknowingly,
if at all.