Poem of the Week | November 24, 2025

“The Error of My Ways” by Joseph J. Capista is our Poem of the Week.

Joseph J. Capista is the author of Intrusive Beauty (Ohio University Press). His poems have appeared in Agni, Copper Nickel, the Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Daily. He teaches at Towson University and lives with his family in Baltimore.

The Error of My Ways

                                             Let’s figure out what makes you so dang angry.

                                             Next we’ll figure out why, said Bob, and finally

                                             the Francis-Louden Mystical Orientation Scale

                                             will permit our quantification of your ineffability,

                                             oneness, and timelessness. Kabuki or kabbalah,

                                             I said, our task at hand is ensuring these squeegee

                                             kids properly complete their Schedule C forms

                                             to report last tax year’s accrued cash earnings.

                                             Make A Difference Day. Such a crapshoot.

                                             Banana leaves encircling its neck and pink

                                             handles make this flask, explains the gallery

                                             plaque, a ringer of a fake. From down here,

                                             the Catskills really do look like the cat’s kills

                                             and not a mere conceptualization of cat skills.

                                             Just a coxswain looking for a scull, I said.

                                             You’d make a dandy widower, Bob said.

                                             Of these Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit,

                                             I said, nary a one appends its gift receipt.

                                             If the shipwright wants to know whether his

                                             new vessel is seaworthy, Bob said, he does

                                             not launch it upon a writhing ship-hungry sea.

                                             He drags it to the beach, then fills its hull

                                             with bucket after bucket of the very seawater

                                             that longs for it to founder in the briny deep,

                                             said Bob. Dry beach? No leaks. This my fellow

                                             paraprofessional is the error of your ways.

Author’s Note

“The Error of My Ways” is a conscious attempt to embrace a poetics of disruption. After futzing with the iambic foot for a decade, I grew supremely disenchanted with the veneer of seamlessness exhibited by many poems I had come to love—and often emulated. Pulling language from the federal tax code, mystical psychometrics, Baltimore City streets, wisdom literature, a museum placard, Roman Catholicism, and the neoliberal marketplace, this poem aspires to a sort of incandescent whiplash with a pinch of wabi-sabi gravitas. “Poems,” I once heard Robert Hass say, “are really just lists.” I think about that remark a lot these days. What’s more, I am an illustrious klutz. Embracing this personal truth in recent work—my ardent flubs, my fervent mistakes, my astonishing incapacity to get anything right the first time—has humbled me in the most liberating of ways. As an ever-erring lefty who’s navigating our culture of right-handedness, I’ve perhaps found a vocation: wielding the tool of language with the same rollicking accident-proneness with which I wield basic power tools.