the big poemy poem

you find yourself writing a poemy poem.
just couldn't help it.
you think of all the poemy poems
that stretch from the Iliad and Odyssey
(well, they were strictly oral at first)
past the present moment
to the end of the scroll
big enough to crush New York,
deforest a continent–
all that beauty
all that longing
all that eloquence
buried in there
with all those words.

but, then, a kiss,
though a minor variation
on a gazillion other smackers
is just as fine
or can be
given
you know
it isn't a turd
or whatever.

suppose art is all in the head.
its meaning and significance
is up to you
like the way
water
mists in the air,
the time the age the world
others opening their mouths
and tapping keys,
sex and birth and death,
bombs flying, assassinations,
more technology,
more understanding, misunderstanding
more forests of poems combatting
and capitualating to propaganda murder and murmering,
meaning what we make
to continue
we continue
to think
to continue,
poemy poems
and other things
never enough,
more of the same
till the scroll
rolls off the
edge of the world,
begins to unravel
and there, finally,
each poem has its place
in the collected
poems of humanity
and if they could
they would bring it back,
exhibit it,
but it has passed Neptune now
unfurled larger than the rings of Jupiter,
forever unfurled in space
where finally it has the room
it needs,
all that information,
enough to make one whole person,
po.n.a and paper flesh,
vast combinatorium of beauty and musing,
spewing and sputtering,
grasping for the unsayable
beyond the scroll,
spaceships caught like flies
in the twisting scroll
as it drifts through space,
tanned by Alpha Centuri
but not quite ignited,
drifting further and further away
into the interstellar soup,
back to the beginning…