#25

It was a misstep, a poem never published.

What river is the Thames?
What place is the Globe?
What space does it occupy?
The Royal Company, what of it?

What is Harvard?
What is Yale?
What is even the University of Michigan?

I might ask
What is Kilimanjaro?
What is K-2?
What even is Everest? It is the tritest mountain now.

I could catalog, all of my life, places that I will
never have been to or missed at miraculous
times, key points, in my life. I could spend all
of my time filling a great, depressing volume
that would win me some regard and take me to
some places that were in the book. It might even
thin the book, the presence of itself.

What if I find happiness sometime, in my book
trek? Then can I say that it is not the most I could
have gotten? Or the best I could have had? Will
this meditation salvage that in the best way?
If I just stay at the fork and write about it, which
strange third path am I moved down? What
horrors await me in that forest of contemplation?

Who is watching? No one.
And what must I do?