One Less X

How Boole put it. Take a class,
A set out of the world,
And call it x. Then the class

Of all non-x, all the rest
Of the world, is one, less x.
Let x stand for poems, the world

Of non-poems, which is not poems,
Is all one, less x. We float
In this spill of waves called poems

And say, all the world is one
Less all of us. While plus us,
The world is one, but non’s gone.

Glue Plant

Poems are crimes. The past will change.
You can try to glue these things,
Tar and pitch them, boil some hides.

Poems are sins. The ones you love
May turn out to be the work
Of the kind of life you hate.

You know what we mean—those fine lines
Linked to the stench of a fouled soul,
The deep lake of text with a corpse.

There’s the poem with the phrase that soars
By one who hates you, hates your kind.
There’s the fine turn for the vile term.

There are those by those who are cruel.
Those by those who are not pure
Or not kind, or not the right kind.

You can screen for poems from bad minds,
But that’s how poems get to be crimes.
Some are burned, quick-limed, or white-washed.

Some wear the sins of their source life
Like signs hung from their neck with ropes.
We’re not sure who to feel worse for—

The rank beasts whose hides must be boiled,
The words like us, left shelved so long
We’re bound to ooze sin, too. Or you.

Guilt’s What’s Left of What’s Left Out

What is it you don’t want to see?
How bad it was. How much was you.

The harm done to the lives of those
Like you, not quite like you, too much

Like you. You. What you did not stop.
What you did. What pain came from this.

What you did by what you left out.
The sin you said you did not see.

The sin you did. The cut you made.
What turned your head. Who will not see.