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THE ARRIVAL
For years on end I have been sitting here
Impatiently awaiting potency; some explosive revelatory surge
That will carry me away and permit no looking back.
But this moment of deliverance has not arrived,
And I have done nothing to hasten it.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps I wasn’t meant to do anything:
In which case, I have succeeded admirably.
ACCOMPLISHMENT
It would be a relief if I could resign myself
To unproductivity and simply exist
Unburdened by this tiresome need to produce
That has been the cause of so much unpleasantness.
It’s not as if I do anything with my time
And as for most of the people who do accomplish
Anything: one rather wishes they hadn’t bothered either.
Accomplishment, I suspect, is overrated.
CITADEL
Am I empty at the core or just around the edges?
Are there riches therein? I wouldn’t know.
I’m weighed down in a warm white glow,
Crushing the stark yellow dullness of the day
Into dust, statically and statelessly drifting
Throughout this haze of rust. Riding the waves
Of lostness across the landscape of a desk,
Into the bulwark of a threadbare curtain.
LIFE WITHOUT WORK
To do nothing
In this day and age,
When so much pointless work
Is being produced,
Could almost be considered an achievement.
It all compares most unfavorably
With my own imaginary
Body of work.
PATRONAGE OF NEGATION
I am constantly confronted by other people’s works
That I could have created myself.
And I am constantly disappointed by them.
Sadly, I have to recognize them
For what they are: inferior versions
Of what I could have done
If I’d been insecure enough in my abilities
To do anything.
TO POSTERITY
My most profound observations
Have gone unrecorded. They were too subtle
And I was too lazy to pin them down.
I was always sluggishly scrambling
Onto the next thing that would remain undone
Or underdone. It was, of course, within my power
To formulate them, despite the fact
That no evidence of them exists.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Tottenham, J. From the Inertia Variations . Dialect Anthropol 34, 245–247 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-010-9194-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-010-9194-6