It happens to all of us, sometimes, all of us poets. In fact, I believe they call it the poets’ curse. Some of us are poets who do not write poetry, or even write at all. Some of us cannot. But it happens to all of us; all us poets.

You have to watch yourself.

If you don’t: well. It gets you. It’s insidious, you know? It creeps into your mind.

Like when you sat on the floor. It is comfortable in the summer, you lie below the line of vision of the heat haze, and sometimes, sometimes, it can’t get at you. You sat on the floor, and it was comfortable. You felt like you could sit there for a long time. You saw yourself putting down roots. Slender roots, which tease the tiles apart, insinuating themselves between them, and then they thicken, and become wood, and the tiles bend and then splinter, but slowly, very slowly, and the crumbling dust lies in a sinuous pattern of thick cords of dust against a faint background of powdered nothings.

You see how easy it is to slip into it? Now do you believe me?

You have to watch yourself. Constantly.

Or you could end up on the back of a bus looking at a rainbow of oil on a wet street, and wondering what it would be like to throw frozen cubes of gasoline into a fire.

Or you would be walking down the street, talking with this old dog you used to see around, but don’t, anymore. He’d be teaching you philosophy, and you’d listen. “…Because if the food is rotten the first time you sniff it,” he’d be saying, “it’ll still be rotten after you sniff it a hundred times, only more so, so you’ve got to know when to walk away…”

And sometimes, sometimes, you could be looking at a man who had coughed in your general direction, without covering his mouth, only you wouldn’t be looking at him straight, you’d be somewhere high, somewhere quite far away, and you’d be looking at him through the sights of a sniper’s rifle, and then, you’d exhale, like they taught you, and pull your finger tight on the trigger, ever so softly, and his head would explode in a rainbow of blood.

Careful. Stop. Look at that sign. Sixteen times sixteen is two hundred and fifty six. The poets curse. You cant escape it. You just have to watch yourself. There, you see? Are you watching yourself? Are you watching yourself watching yourself? Are you watching yourself watching yourself watching yourself?