I don't know
what an I is,
or a me,
or a self.

Every time
attention turns there,
like fog,
it can't be grasped
again.

These habits of mind,
these memories, this faith,
these commitments to the sense
of an idea

are they I?

Perhaps the pressure
of this ass
pressing down into the chair,
or the taste of the just lit cigarette,
or the memory
of when she let me hold her hand
from that other poem
might count?

Ditto the itch, or the smile,
or the hurt
that comes from the remembering
whatever awful times
before,
all willy nilly
and sometimes uninvited.

Are they I?

Just as the looking goes,
them divisions disappear
and the merging
once talked about,
however many patriarchs ago,
rears itself from slumber
to scream across the divide
not so fast buckaroo,
not so fast.

So it seems,
the illusion
of what it is to be an is
fades away
at the mere thought
of being touched,
by the haze
of everything else.

Which turns these words
to the realization
that whatever an I is
is bounded poorly at best
on the inside and the outside

raising an interesting question
about those people,
living in the dirt
and dying in their own starving filth:
who are they?
and am I they too?