This poem means nothing

Lindsay Kulla

I wrote this poem

From perspectives unavailable

To any audience

My world has different maps

Ordering different cultures

I order you into mine

I am not telling a simple story

I am mystifying you

My story is my companion

I am trying once again

To figure out my meaning

While you talk?

Your landscape is more figurative

Than you are literal

Your plot has not been pushed

Into explanations of the people

I explain to you nothing

But neither does the dialogue

The right words to the right questions

Are the wrong answers

Answered wrong

I have no specific lesson to teach

My moral position is more ambiguous than uncertain

My journey’s confrontations are growing

Unrecognizable.

The others cannot impose meanings on others

The meanings they impose reflect

Only their own anxieties

Darkness describes fog when there is a weird cry

There is no whisper or shadow

Behind you besides your swallow

This poem is fascinating

But never arrives at the meaning

The people leave without leaving

And I know there is no end

I ask constant questions

That only suggest foreign mysteries

I cannot reveal what I cannot explain

You are signs frequently confronting me

With secret tests

You are the question that

I cannot interpret by writing

This poem is a thing

Seen, smelled and tasted

But not truly experienced

I am told there is a meaning

But it is beyond my literal

Old women knit black wool

Perhaps

They relate to relatives simply

These images that I wear on my

Wool and my clothing that

Shrieks with piercing colors—somber but useful

I route my destiny and jump from your cliff

The getaway is far too mysterious

As I slip into the getaway of

The underworld nocturnia

Your demeanor is too serious

For my mystery

This is a poem that you will leave here

Follow my cliff drop

And blast me needlessly into unused

Rivulets

Stolen from within moist inner barrels

Breaking free with a dynamic sleep

I dream

And there are no signs

This poem means nothing

Nothing at all.