Consciousness

What more can you tell us about “Consciousness”?

I do remember struggling to make a bigger statement. Early versions of this poem tried too hard, in too many words, to capture a state of mind where the speaker feels out of place, melancholic, nostalgic . . . The four words that remain were ultimately the only ones I trusted. The title came last, and though I worried about the whole being too flippant, too Zen, I thought it might at least work as a quirky puzzle, the quick sort of thing I enjoyed in Richard Brautigan’s poetry books when I was younger.

Given time, I was happier with the sound of the thing, the thingness of the thing. “Between” has more to do with awareness than I realized, and that drive to make things such as plastic ballerinas never strikes me as a waste of one’s consciousness.