[One More New Project]

One more new project
to replace an unfinished
now abandoned plan.

In the previous
my attempted confessions
failed predictably,

a designed success,
my private boring secrets
mute, wormed, kept from me.

Already amiss
with explanation, adrift
in defensive pose

more prose than poem (is
poem one syllable or two?),
after five stanzas

exit strategies
are contemplated. What I
can't write for myself

is what this poem can't
be. What every poem I write
is: about itself

and what I refuse
to admit. A viable
system and program

for filling tablets
with squiggles without effect
much less personal

edification.
I can write the kind of poem
I don't like to read,

self-referential,
concerned with clasping objects
against their subjects.

Now, stanzas again,
counting beats, repeating ploys
that work by failure.