Yessing

Let's workshop this Parmenidean poem about Nietzschean affirmation

Yessing

Yes, even the deep thirst for oblivion
remains an expression of the ultimate
nonoblivion. This is not only because 
it is a thirst. Oblivion—if at all real,
if at all anything—amounts to a style
of the One. Nothing is, if it is at all; 
insofar as it is, it is a mode of Being.

Except Being itself, the eternal One,
all are aspects of Being. Reality, that is,
can in no sense be pushed off to one 
side of a division. It is like a sticky goo,
goo that is the same as that to which
it “sticks.” It swallows any candidate
nonreality in its inescapable presence.
 
Uncompromised yes-saying, the full
embrace of reality (of which Nietzsche
spoke), must then go to the extreme
that perhaps Whitman approached:
seeing the yes even of reality hatred
and, yes, even yessing reality hatred—
yessing all attitudes and walks of life.

This poem was published in Artifact Nouveau (2022)

Photo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman