A Metaphor. I shower with scalp hotter than
hands; shampooing, feel two waters: cold on
head, warm on hands--in the same place.

Academia: burrowers deeper & deeper into the
semi-meaningful, in flight from noise. --An
attitude college graduates must graduate out of.

Quantitative verse: using a fist for a sieve.

Headline: "Blind Sailor Challenges the Ocean".
The story of my life.

"Descartes was all wrong about animals. It isn't
the animals who are robots; it's us." --Colin
Wilson

N.B. the term metaphor means nothing more than
to showcase the focussing power of a name. It is
self-referential but not infinite or basic on that
account. There are different kinds of focus a name
can aid. --But i use 'metaphor' rather than 'name'
because the other seems to cover only those opaque
arbitrary coins we feed our data-machines with. If you
imagine Shakespeare's "a name to conjure with" --or
one of your childhood idols-- you will not need to be
limited to the word 'metaphor'. To name is to create
& destroy at once. This is clearest when someone
renames something better than it was named before &
the old name drops out of circulation. (At present
this process is distorted by propaganda. The real
namers are carefully excluded from the name-factory's
controls.) A poet today, then, is confronted with a
double conundrum. There seems to be "nothing new to
say" (nor any new way to say it), & no one will listen
anyway. Both of these are half-truths. If a poet really
does exercise his power of naming (& most of us i
suspect refrain, from whatever reason), it does get
heard. And that is new for the context enough, & all
that any other breakthrough was, too, before it became
mythologized... --Anyway, this for me demonstrates
the inherently political context of our poetry. But
how unpoetical our politics are! Indeed Magic seems
a more promising career...even to have to reinvent
it entirely, than to struggle against two centuries'
accumulation of dead poetry--these "ideologies"--
names that hide.