PS: The moment that other poets remember most from this poem is the joke:

"Clouds outside make days different
From other days, in the quality of light
Or they make Rorschach shapes
Clouds outside love the pathetic fallacy
And wander around lonely"

Look up the Pathetic Fallacy if you haven't heard of it, it's waiting for you to.

And I will never have the time to do that. As I wrote in yesterday's poem: "America, you get the fucking poets you deserve."

Everyone's voice is valuable is another way of saying that no one's voice is valuable, that there might as well not be human voices at all but just the voice of the Earth. The rest is labor, a very different and human thing.

/fin

The end is the crystalized thought that the poem is struggling towards, but doesn't quite reach because it's not quite finished. I've tried variations like "Your voice isn't needed" or "No one's voice is needed" but -- it needs more editing than I can give it.

Did you ever see the draft version of Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay"? It was like three times longer than the masterpiece of concision that it became.

Poetry is not human:

"The easiest way to resolve is go backwards
Before there were words or understanding
Before cats evolved, before there were clouds
Before the Earth formed an atmosphere
Before an inside or an outside, there was poetry

Poetry is inhuman
Everywhere the Earth from the beginning
No voices are needed "

So: cats, clouds, poetry itself. Each presented as itself inside, and as itself outside.

So the poem is also about my love of classification and organization which stands me in good stead as a librarian, but not a poet. You may have noticed that my posts contain more numbered points than any human should really produce.