Everyday I keep filling my notebook with lists. Laundry.
    Email. Deposit checks. Hand soap. Return address labels.
Travel shave foam. I make little bullet points with my pen
    and try to keep the bullets straight down the page.


Then I put a line through and a check mark next to each item
    as I accomplish it, as if to convince myself it were done.
Can one fill with blankness? Try emptied of fullness.
    Always something left to accomplish, as lists spawn


more lists and are potentially infinite, with nothing to cap
     their form, like a couplet. Just now I made a list
that begins, No more lists! Then I realized that was the end
    and put a line through and a check mark next to it.


More troubling, though, is the sense that these lists represent
     my attempt to create a feeling of accomplishment
where no accomplishment is—not even a feeling, tadpoles
    of feeling, far from a full frog; and thus I wriggle


instead of building up the frog hops that could get me
     from pad to pad meditating on frog matters, surely more
interesting than tadpole trivialities, including things like
    the taste of flies and the feel of air and rain and the ramification


of water—and I could wield that whiplash of tongue
    like a lyric weapon in the bog. How is it with you, my self,
when you’ve gotten so low you’re thinking through a frog?
     Sent dad a golf trunk organizer? Peed a little by the window?


That was supposed to read, “Read a little by the window.”
    I am listing things in the past now, though this list is broken
all over my notebook—Get a list trunk organizer—
    so leafing through it is like finding little pieces of myself


crumbled off from where a tire had smashed through
    and left me printed zigzagged cracking on the ground.
I don’t know where I am. And in the eyes of my friends,
    a flicker of difference, as if they long for the days


when they didn’t have to talk to such well-pressed debris.
    I can see it in them, too, the crumbling of the best version
of themselves they’d planned, the work of themselves
    neglected, no longer approached as a daily problem,


so that we’re all left sitting around vaguely thinking
    there’s some kind of problem, when the problem is that
there is no problem, we don’t see ourselves as problems,
    we’ve relaxed the math. Trash bags. Vacuum. Soup.