Un Autre Monde Poem by John Koethe

The nervous style and faintly reassuring
Tone of voice concealed inside the meanings
Incompletely grasped and constantly disappearing
As the isolated moments burst against each other
And subside-these are the aspects left behind
Once the sense is over, and the confusion spent.
They belong to the naive, perennial attempt to see
And shift the focus of experience, fundamentally
Revising what it means to feel, yet realizing
Merely some minor, disappointing alterations
In the fixed scheme of things. I bring to it
Nothing but bare need, blind, continual obsession
With the private way life passes into nothing
And a mind as fragile as a heart. It started out
Indifferently but soon became my real way of feeling,
Abstract tears, an anger retrospectively revealing
Darker interpretations of the fears that filled rme to
Exploding, ill-defined desires, vague anxieties and
Satisfactions that were once so much a part of me
I miss them, and I want them back. And yet in time
They did come back as wishes, but the kind of wishes
Long ago abandoned, left behind like markers on the way
To resignation, and then as infinitely fine regrets,
And then as aspects of some near, receding world
Inert as yesterday, and no longer mine.