Robert Kern's untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks, tells the story of a private rebellion and how it ran out of air. In 1968, the speaker becomes a vegetarian and gives four "Reasons." The poem's central idea is the distance between a gesture and a system. One person can change what he eats, how he lives, even how he thinks of himself, but "the merciless sponge of the System" soaks up the change. What is left is an ordinary life and a taste for rumors of someone else's revolt.
The numbered list is the funniest part. Reasons one to three are grand: to become plantlike, to stop consuming, to live like a member of the Third World. Reason four is "To do it." That is a joke, and it is also an honest confession. Under the political language sits a plain wish to act, to be someone who commits to something. The solemn, almost legal tone of "Reasons: 1)" makes the deflation land harder.
The poem's next move is its best. After the short, flat line "I did it," a chain of present participles takes over: "making friends," "frowning," "denying," "plunking down roots," "attaching," "loving," "drawing." There is no main verb to finish the thought, so the speaker seems to keep growing, line after line. The images turn him into a plant by degrees. First he befriends bushes, then he frowns at porkchops (a human gesture, comically small against a supermarket), and finally he is rooted, loving rain, "drawing toward the sun." "Plunking down roots" is also a colloquial phrase for settling, and "plunking down" is what people do with money. Even in his escape from consuming, the speaker's language keeps a trace of the marketplace.
The second stanza opens with a stage direction: "Enter, the merciless sponge of the System." The sponge is a clever choice because it is the plant's image turned sour. Roots absorb rain and a sponge absorbs everything, so the speaker's hunger for nature meets a bigger, indifferent hunger. What follows is a run of fragments without a main verb: "the wilderness going down / revelation becoming habit / all joy vaporized / a withering." The -ing forms that once suggested growth now describe decline, and "becoming" has turned from transformation into routine. The vegetable metaphor holds to the end, but "a withering" is where the plant imagery has led. The line stands alone and short, a dying fall.
Then the speaker "enters" too, a repeated word that makes his surrender look like a second stage entrance. "The world of consenting adults" is sharply ironic. Consent sounds free, yet the word here describes giving in, and "adults" implies that rebellion was a phase to be outgrown. "By day and by night" gives the new life the dull rhythm of routine. The final image is both pathetic and tender: he will "shiver and thrill / to rumors / of the American Liberation Front." The name echoes the militant "liberation" groups that exist in the public imagination, but here it stays a rumor. The man who wanted to do it has become someone who hears about others doing it. The line break after "rumors" leaves the word hanging, and the speaker is left suspended too.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed meter. It uses short, speech-like lines and relies on small sound patterns, such as the hissing "sponge of the System" and the paired "shiver and thrill." The shifts in pace carry the argument. The first stanza gathers momentum through its list, and the second breaks into pieces.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tone. It does not simply mock the young idealist or the system that absorbed him. The speaker laughs at himself ("To do it") but still feels the pull of the old ideals, and that thrill in the last lines is real. The poem admits that disillusion is rarely a clean break. It is more often a slow settling that leaves some longing behind.