Ahh, yes, thank you, Tony Hoagland. Meanness is at a premium right now.

I am staring three incomplete poems in the face. Well, not literally: they don’t have eyes. But if they did, they’d probably have faces, too, and these faces would almost certainly be sneering at me.

I am staring at two computer screens, side by side, on which I have three unfinished poems. I look from one to the next to the next and then back to the first. From time to time, I close two of them and stare just at one.

Each of these poems is resisting being finished. It must be resistance, as I have the time and the inclination now to finish one or all three. So why aren’t they being finished?

I tried two nights ago to combine them. Isn’t that the logical next move? “Well, this seems incomplete, and that seems incomplete, so they’ll be like Jerry Maguire when they meet and gush, ‘You complete me.’” This was, of course, a spectacular failure. As was Jerry Maguire.

I also tried working backwards, as I’ve been told that about one in twenty-three poems reads as well with the lines in reverse order as it does with the lines going forward. None of these poems were in the lucky twenty-three. I did, however, get one naughty bit out of the exercise.

I have the sense that Johnny Cash would not have had any trouble finishing one or all of these poems. Wouldn’t you like to have a Johnny Cash who would come to your house and finish what you’ve left unfinished? Not the Johnny Cash, but a Johnny Cash. Not only could he finish your manuscript, he’d finish the dishes and the vacuuming. And when you thanked him, he’d warble something mysterious like, “We all have our ways.”

Truth be told, the Johnny Cash thing is a cute fantasy but it doesn’t address the simple fact of the situation: I should put these three poems aside for a while. I should work on revising something older, one of the other unfinished pieces of jetsam that has piled up over the years.

Johnny Cash would already have made hit songs out of them.