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Poems

Chapter 22: RADICAL
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About This Book

A collection of concise lyric pieces that employ precise diction, striking imagery, and ironic observation to examine perception, art, and everyday life. Poems shift between playful personifications of machines and animals and sober meditations on aesthetic judgment, moral intention, and human foibles, often using concrete objects as metaphors. The speaker alternates between wit and seriousness, favoring compressed forms, unexpected juxtapositions, and careful detail to probe how language, experience, and power shape understanding.

RADICAL

Tapering to a point, conserving everything, this carrot is predefined to be thick. The world is but a circumstance, a mis- erable corn-patch for its feet. With ambition, imagination, outgrowth,
nutriment, with everything crammed belligerent- ly inside itself, its fibres breed mon- opoly— a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat to the color of the set-
ting sun and stiff. For the man in the straw hat, stand- ing still and turning to look back at it— as much as to say my happiest moment has been funereal in comparison with this, the con- ditions of life pre-
determined slavery to be easy and freedom hard. For it? Dismiss agrarian lore; it tells him this: that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.