James Holbert's original poem, and the new Revised Version

(This one is the original)

On K

My imitations fall from the sky.

And I hope they rain on the head of the man they’re made of.

If they did, he would not care;

He walks with his head down.

He stole me years ago.

He did not mean to.

I followed along,

But he does not ever look back.

My Prince, my King,

I try to understand him;

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

“My King, what ever do you mean?”

There is silence:

I must turn to ink.

I learn and I pretend.

Actually, I know not a thing.

“You are a child in a man.”

—But, then again, I don’t know—

“How then might I become a man?”

My imitations fall to the ground.

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(This is the Revised Version)

On K

A broad tree of beginning has been planted before me and I am to make a taste of the apple. When the day begins I am already at a writing table. Sleep. Or black. Or nothing? The day is night now and I stoop over a hole my size. K stands away from me, across the blank river between us. His shovel sweeps up piles of sheets of familiarity, tossing them into the hole; they don’t even flutter as they fall to its bottom and sink in the air like hefty stones. When it is done, a pen flies through my chest and I pick it up after it has fallen to the ground. K doesn’t look at me and so fills the hole with an almost endless blanket of dirt. It goes high, higher over the level ground, mounting until a great skyscraper of dirt appears before me. It takes four years for K to climb it. Then he points down from the tip of the dirt skyscraper, downward as that finger descends, passing all the heavens and all the clouds and all the birds and all the nothingness in between, and then I am to vaguely see he points to the tombstone at the front of the skyscraper. I go with the pen and it writes smoothly, cutting through the stone like it is not attached to this, my own hand. With this new everything I write my first permanent words: “HERE LIES—”