i started thinking about that poem again when r. mentioned she couldn't respond to yesterday's posts because the roof was being repaired, how the line i have wasted my life blew through my belly and groin so long ago. how it went straight past my head to my gut, and i knew what poetry could be, and what waste could mean. the kind of wasted thought that would call laying in a hammock writing poetry a waste, the kind that calls time money, the errant and useless consumption that produces the actual waste, how the waste of time of poetry produces spirit, insight and revelation, how good poems grow the soul. that the society that, all-consumed by production, of consumers by consumers for consumers, considers not the products of waste, and deems the lack of ambition for power and money a waste of life. how the society grows waste, mountains and gyres and archipelagoes of waste, while the spirit wastes away. i've thought i was a bad poet before, but never thought that it was a waste of time, and now i think it was not bad, but it was seeking goodness, which is, inherently, good. it is good to think about what waste, and what spirit, means.