The Big Black Book

I think the dissertation is somewhere in Wilson Library.

Or where the hell is it?
Joe Green found it the other day.

Nearly busted his sacroiliac
kneeling and trying to pull
it out from a bottom shelf.

Now it’s back,
resting there
peacefully.

I wonder if others have consulted it
in the nearly thirty years
it has been available.

One might feel bitter,
but I don’t.
I certainly could have done more to promote it.

It was rejected by one editor,
who said it was part of an earlier conversation,
but I never sent it to another.

Regretful, yes.
How can there not
be regrets?

Thinking about what you didn’t do
can eat up all the joy
in what you did do.

Like one of those black holes Stephen Hawking
has us all worried about.
Don’t look now, but you and everything you love

are due to be sucked into a nothing mouth 
that’s growing somewhere near
some nebula or other.

So I pull my hat down
over my eyes
and walk across the tracks.

There’s some pretty lively stuff in that dissertation.
I wonder if it’s illegal to publish some of it with ISSUU.
Nah, I doubt if it could be cut well enough to be readable.