Six short lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter: "Thesis 64" looks like a note scribbled at speed, yet it is built with real attention to sound. The title promises an argument. A thesis, numbered as if it belongs to a longer sequence, should come with reasoning. What follows is a command, a question and a few images that never quite join up, and the poem's pleasure lies in how close they come to joining.
Start with "ask the trashcan zen." The imperative sets up a speaker sending us to consult an oracle, and the oracle is a rubbish bin. The grammar won't settle. "Zen" can attach to "trashcan" as a compound, a kind of calm found among the discarded, or it can be the thing we're asking the bin to hand over. Either way, wisdom is sought among what has been thrown away. The next line makes the oracle's answer "a guess of bones." The phrasing copies collective nouns like "a murder of crows," but the word "guess" swaps certainty for doubt. Bones are what remains once everything else is gone, and the phrase suggests fortune-telling, as if the bones were thrown and read. The final line may quietly extend this. Tea leaves are another thing people read for fortunes, and used teabags are standard trashcan fare.
The third line, "how much later ago," is the most unsettling. "Later" points forward and "ago" points back, and the two collide in one phrase. The speaker seems unable to tell whether the next line's "barricades" lie in the past or the future. The fourth line, "to the barricades," borrows the rallying cry of revolt, but with no exclamation mark and no verb. It is only a destination, and nobody is going. A call to arms turns into something measured at a distance, an event to ask about rather than join.
Then comes "blizzards," alone, two syllables, plural. It can be a noun, or it can work as a verb, as if the weather itself were acting. Either way, snow is what buries things. The single word sits in a field of white space, and the layout itself looks snowed-in. After the barricades, the poem suggests, comes a long whiteout of time that covers the evidence.
The last line, "at tar and tea," puts two dark, staining substances side by side. Both are associated with heat and boiling, which sets them against the cold of the blizzard. Readers who know their revolutionary history may hear tarring and teachests in the harbour, but the poem never confirms this, so it is only an echo it leaves open. The line's t sounds also echo "trashcan" in the first line, so the poem begins and ends on the same consonant.
That sound-work matters because the poem has no rhyme. Instead it uses quieter links. The b of "bones," "barricades" and "blizzards" runs across lines two, four and five, tying together what is left behind, what was fought for and what covers it all. The n of "can," "zen" and "bones" hums through the opening. The rhythm shows the same shaping. The first four lines run five or six syllables, steady enough to feel like a chant, and then the poem shrinks to two syllables and four. The thinning matches the content, as if the language were being buried too.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it enacts its own subject. Its central idea, as I read it, is that history reaches us as debris: bones, tea dregs, tar stains, a half-remembered slogan. We can only guess at what they add up to. The word "guess" in line two describes the reader's job exactly. We are handed fragments from a trashcan and asked to read them like an oracle, and the poem refuses to say whether we have read them rightly. That refusal can be frustrating, but it is also the poem's honesty. It admits that the distance between us and the barricades can't be measured, however sure we sound when we claim to know.