What Passes

discovered sleeping slumping at his screen the
poet finds his mind had wandered from what
he was reading in the East Coast liberal press
blurring into swimming letters refusing to cohere
as words and sentences and mean what they mean
to him, that he still can see enough to read and grasp
relevant revelatory formulations for his terminal time
goes on without him still wanting to make sense of it
the poet floats among possible insights into being
what he cannot cease to be alive or dead alert or what
passes for cognition amid general decline and falling
we continue to love and stay open to the great reveal