20 July 2004. I'm in my null zone. I just pushed a poem from a few days ago that I'd only written two or three lines of into the following quite accurate reflection of my mood:

                   Poem Visits A Self-Referential Poem

                   No matter how tedious Philistines 
                   thought 
                   self-referential poems were,
                   Poem enjoyed them.  
                   The one he was currently visiting
                   didn't enthuse him, though.  
                   It squatted who-knows-where,
                   klunkingly enamelless--
                   except, perhaps,
                   slightly, 
                   in his thoughts about it.
                   Some kind of tree etched
                   a network of skinny bare branches
                   across most of it.
                   
                   But the unnamed tree and he were all there was in it--
                   and not even all of the tree was there.
                   You could add the negative spaces as sky
                   but if they were sky, it wasn't sky
                   you could imagine
                   forming a cloud
                   or entered by a bird.
                   Poem nonetheless
                   kept perusing
                   the poem's nothing
                   of note
                   or hue 
                   for 
                   hours
                   until the 
                   poem dwin
                   dled
                   to its
                   smal
                   lest
                   pt.
                   &
                   he
                   ga
                   ve
                   u
                   p
                   .