Want - June 10 2025

 

Want

June 10 2025

Sometimes, all I want is to hunker down.

Curl up

like a mummified homunculus,

in the fetal position

head tucked-in

someplace dry.

Or retire into my shell

like a self-contained crustacean;

a hermit crab, in its boneless skin,

slipping-in

to its borrowed home.

Which is really not wanting at all.

Because don’t we always want more, not less?

Isn’t that what wanting is for?

Aren’t we creatures of desire

who accumulate, acquire, possess

then find room for it all?

While I’m against complexity.

I’d rather strip down, divest, reject

than keep these balls in the air.

After all

the world, in all its folly

will go on

with me or not;

the universe

absurd as it is

will expand, collapse, or stop

no matter what.

I am not a survivalist.

I have no practical skills.

I will probably starve, freeze, or die of thirst.

But it will be peaceful there

on the ocean floor

looking inconspicuous.

Not forever, of course.

Even hermit crabs molt, grow, and reproduce.

But even a short respite would work,

protecting my soft invertebrate body

from the underwater predators

who patrol the benthic depths.

As well as the air-breathing ones

who swagger over the land

with insatiable appetite;

inadequate men

ruled by want

who are never truly satisfied

no matter what.

I was reading, as usual, and the words “hunker down” caught my eye, then stuck with me long enough to seem worth seeing where it would take me. As an introvert who is retired and lives a highly hermetic life, the idea is certainly a familiar one! Especially with the world as it is today, with the existential threats of climate change and pandemic; leaders like Trump, Putin, and Xi (I could go on!); not to mention their entourages of enablers, sycophants, and opportunists. So the opening line wrote itself, and then the rest of the poem naturally followed.

After that, lots of odds and ends of things I’ve seen, heard, and read worm their way in. Like the recently seen movie Memoir of a Snail (how much I identified with the main character, animated or not!), and like Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about the absurdity of the universe. Which I thought strange, because isn’t an esteemed astrophysicist and polymath — by virtue of his lifelong enterprise — supposed to believe the cosmos can be described, measured, and explained? At least eventually?

That process — wrote itself — may sound excessively modest, or just evasive or unself-aware, but it really is true of most of my writing. Because it feels much more like taking dictation than a deliberate creative act. That I’m more stenographer than poet. The ancient Greeks had the concept of a muse. Which is a little too mystical for me, but I suppose is as good an explanation/description as any of how that “flow state” feels.