Empty

A social poem of vacancy and judgment, where intelligence, play, and public space all end in isolation.

'Empty' opens on depopulated play spaces - 'The children, not on swings', 'The courts with no hopping' - then slides into a knotted meditation on intelligence: dealing with people you feel are smarter 'is easy', while 'Lessof intellangce is hard'. The poem ends by naming the whole field empty and the speaker alone: 'All of it empty / To go alone'.

This reads as a rougher, more fractured cousin of 'Un scripted', sharing nearly the same social calculus about smarter and less-intelligent people, but here the OCR-or-handwriting strain shows ('Lessof intellangce', 'intellangce is hard') and is preserved as written. The cryptic 'We don't we do the end of time' resists clean paraphrase and is best left as an unresolved line rather than smoothed over. What holds the poem together is the move from literal vacancy - empty swings and courts - to the felt emptiness of social comparison, as though the speaker can only read absent playgrounds through the lens of who is and is not smarter than him. The closing 'And it is not a playing field' rejects the comforting metaphor of fair competition; the game has no level ground, only the bare verdict 'All of it empty / To go alone'. Because of the garbled middle, this reading stays partly provisional where the source itself is unstable.