No Patience for Poetry

(republished from Euphemism, Illinois State University's creative online journal)

The only reason I like Descartes
Is because he has a short catch-phrase.
“I think, therefore I am.”
Boom.
Philosophy,
in a nutshell.
Poetry requires more than thinking.
Like, feeling.
Then you have to interpret feeling.
Then finding out how complicated those feelings are
And were they come from
Inside yourself, outside yourself, located in time,
the way it connects, disconnects, builds and destroys ideas and concepts…
All in the expanse of the words of the poem, which may even be shorter than
“I think, therefore I am.”
Supposedly the way Descartes’ great epiphany is all greatness of Man’s ideas,
confined
To a point.
A finite point which encompasses everything, and everything can be built on it.
But it requires no feeling and reduced the complexity of life and analysis of it
To a point.
Yet a poem rips that concept a new one.

Farther back in philosophy, there’s Plato.
Plato hated poets.
Yet his language is just as complex and beautiful, it has meaning that
Betrays his feelings, while he tries
to make his Socrates pull out that kind of
Finity.
To suggest these philosopher’s were devoid of feeling or that their works
Could be reduced to that kind of a point is
Point-
less.

Yet at the same time, that is what they attempt to convince us of in Absolutism.
Which unfortunately creates the system of false duality,
the “something is” or “it isn’t” dilemma,
the troubled idea of, you’re with us or against us.
There is concentrated hatred in that finity.
Yet in that order of finity
There is a wish to make things
Simplier.
Less complex.
Bring life to a point.
Or find the point in life.
Poetry unleashes the magnitude of that finity
A scary, lovely, saddening, maddening, fanatic-inducing, desire-producing
Point.
Which is secretly devoured by the absolutist philosophers,
“romantics” at heart.
Or those with a heart to begin with,
which they often wish to forget is there
by thinking.
An escapist point, this contained yet created bundle of energy,
which through thinking about it we become outsiders from it, detached
As philosophers, observers that Other ourselves outside the chaos contained.

So then there is my lack of patience for the expansion of that finity.
While I am simultaneously and constantly allured
by that which does not make sense
in that chaos-filled
point,
That driving curiosity which makes me analyze the passions of this world in so many ways that absolutism limits
Far too greatly by suggesting there is only
a line of logic
and a way to refute it,
but I should not necessarily see the connections in their full glory of multi-dimensions.
This is because of the already explained
point.
Instead, memorize the point,
hell, you can even analyze the point, but know
that point is all there is, there are no
lay-
ers
which cannot be explained away
by thinking.

My lack of patience is because of my having been trained
to think, therefore I am pointed.
However, when I try to read poetry or then attempt to feel, according to absolutists,
these deniers of the heart,
I am undeniably
missing the point.