I’m waiting for the words        to catch up to my heart    which is 
elliptical at the moment            there’s an apology 

even I am expecting to bore out of my throat

                                                                         but what for            what for 

I am continuing to write in a font        that displeasures me 
            everything shifts so rapidly

my body           the environment           my body            the environment

why not return to something as aggressively unspectacular as arial

a font for all my first thoughts             today I typed the words
                                     “someday, again”

and deleted and retyped                                   deleted and retyped

inside of the collapse                I am still holding on to narrative
            this is not sentiment                 it is how I keep my family together
when I breathe in deep enough I feel it            all the old anger 
waiting to become newer anger            not having the words 

can feel like not having something to hit      I think I wrote that in another poem 
            before

what is the equation that solves everything       ideas are commodity 
            even the idea that ideas are commodity            I don’t even know 

what I have to sell        I’ve spent my entire life living on a fault line
            I know all that’s been made is inherently broken.
This is not me being dour        this is me writing a note
that says I miss you                              I meant that the other way

but the one you were thinking works, too

Copyright © 2023 by Jason Bayani. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 22, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“There was a point where I started to question what I was doing as a poet and if my voice was even needed, which I think was a necessary question for me to explore. But for a while, I didn’t write because that question made me uncomfortable and I tend to avoid discomfort. I don’t know if this poem is me facing that; maybe it’s a beginning, a negotiation of some kind, a way to find my way back to the table, or a way to understand my poetics inside of a world in collapse.”
—Jason Bayani