Emptying the Inbox

I didn’t foresee the internet when young,
attempt the maths for the red skin cell,
separate the pollen from its very name;
didn’t twice become the witness from
The Lords And The New Creatures.
I didn’t achieve the face of stars,
didn’t speak against September 11th
in 2000, among many other prophecies.
I didn’t write the highest-marked A-
level examination essay in the nation.
I didn’t have many arcane musical
concepts on the go at the same time:
the effervescent mobile, the healing
of the tape that was superglued, the
recording through earphones, the
tattooing of Piper At The Gates of Dawn.
I didn’t host the alignment of The Plough
and the oldest fell Black Combe upon
Mr. Obama’s democratic election.
I didn’t build the Tower, work at a
numinous, purple-bleeding screen.
I didn’t, upon the loss of my father,
make the discovery of a sheet of
paper that bloomed or even grew
pictures depicting the lyric of a song
I wrote with my own doing hand.
I didn’t do whatever it took to then
attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams,
dreams that billow like a weeping
willow in the wind, and come down.
I don’t think the “gestation chamber”
T. S. Eliot writes of in which the poem’s
“dark embryo” grows has now become
an inbox to empty in the Digital Age.
I don’t find it hard to have my story known.
I don’t hope that through some kind of
irony, some kind of ironic self-
distance, I’ve finally cracked it.


John F. B. Tucker

 
If you have any thoughts on this poem, John F. B. Tucker would be pleased to hear them.