For such a metaphorical work, it has a very literal beginning.

In the course of my usual writing routine, on the morning of December 23, 2021, I spilled some coffee unto my notebook page. Then I scrawled, on the lines around the stain, “evidence all over the page/a tipped cup of coffee on December 23.”

A good line.

But evidence of what?

The answer came to me slowly: evidence of a general spilling, of everything. Every aspect of my life. My work. My writing. Even my personality…

In that moment, everything was sloshing around like water in a bucket, some spilling onto the ground.

Is there such a thing as unspilling?

I already had some pieces that evoked a kind of personal disintegration, a crack-up. A poem about fluidity that recalled T.S. Eliot’s Tiresias figure from The Wasteland. A sonnet in alexandrines about Baudelaire. A poem about Barberini’s faun (featured on the cover of my first chapbook I Sit At This Desk and Dream: Notes from a Sunday Morning on Instagram) and the mythological figure of Marsyas. A piece about Priapus. A few animal bits.

But I wrote a lot of it in a burst—carnival imagery, ghosts, fever dreams.

Around that time, during a conversation about weighty matters, a wise and lovely friend said to me, “We are always becoming unbound.”

Soon after, an artist friend, Pier Gustafson, sent me a digital drawing of a weather-beaten classical bust, inspired by a photograph I had sent him.

And there it was…title, cover, poem. We Are Becoming Unbound: A Poem.

It’s a circus of a poem. Sometimes quite literally. But it’s also a poem for people who are wondering “What the hell just happened?” and “What the hell happens next?” and “Can we make some beauty from this mess?”