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I used to only write poems like this one.  Now, I hardly ever write poems of this ilk: allusive, abstract, difficult, whimsical.  You know, New York School, y'all.  They were my teachers, after all. Is this regression?  I thought I'd leave it to a vote.  Let me know if you approve or disapprove.  Yea or nay. If the response if positive, I will not crawl about the room in despair.  If negative, meh.

Machines Made of Meat

                                    The origin of everything is nothing.

In some versions of reality,

You are reading this poem.

In others, you are still in bed.

One is led, therefore, into difficulties,

Except, of course, for Li Po.

That wily bastard is riding a surfboard,

Dangling on the lip of a wave,

Just as his cigarette dangles from his lip,

While he points at an empty space

In the cloudless sky as he sidles by,

Where the moon would want to be,

If it happened to be following along.

Everything is liable to decay.

If someone, traditionally called the observer,

Happened to be following along,

That person would be engaged

In a shameless act of poetry:

Did your friend, Chang, dream

That he was a butterfly, or did

The butterfly dream that it was he?

Nobody knows what’s behind door number three.

Keith Dunlap