The everlooping Here and Now

Why do I frame so many of my poem drafts with "here" or "now" (or a combination of the two, or occasionally the variant "there")?

Why am I compelled to make a presentation of the immediacy? To convince my hypothetical/ghost reader that these jumbles of words, these linguistic confusions of syntax and body have some root, can be grounded in a world splayed out before us?

Iono, perhaps. If so, I am not even particularly convinced of that grounding myself. But I continue to do it, to insist no look it's right here. As if repeating it enough times (here, here, here, now, here) will make it factual, will make some truth manifest. (Take that "manifest" to be either a verb or an adjective, as you would.) In any case, flipping through my notebooks I see it scrawled across the top of page after page (here, now, there is, here, here); a series of snapshots. Or maybe a present-tense fairy-tale I keep starting to tell myself, one that always trails off...

Once upon a now there is a protagonist-type female who rants herself silly about the flapping of tongues. 


Probably she lives alone with her cats.


The end.