I don’t want to say anything, and this has nothing to do with poetry. I am sitting here in the nude on a hot humid summer night. The fan is whirring. The streets are quiet. I am tapping on these keys that make letters on a white screen. There is nothing more here. No hidden significance, no sur-text, no latent emotions, just this tapping. I will be doing this for the rest of my life. What more can I say? The words come. Simple quotidian words, neither rushed nor slow they come.  

When this, our species, is at its end, I can assure you that someone will be composing words and watching them turn into vapor….

Now my wife is getting ready for bed. And when she lies down, nude, like me, she will be another word. Not one I have written but one she has written, for herself, for her son, for her sisters, her mother, brother, friends, and all those students that she teaches. She will be the word that they form in their mouths when they speak of her.

The same for me.

Is this vindication?

Perhaps it is. Then again perhaps it isn’t.