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# Determinance
- URL: https://www.qntns.com/determinance/
- Published: 2025-10-19T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T16:43:18.000Z
- Description: It, it-it-it, it is determinance, an unshakable, infallible certainty of occurrence—that it not only has been decided but that in deciding it has been determined.
- Author: Quentin Staley
- Tags: #fixed-lines, Poems

Determinance

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It, it-it-it,  
it is determinance,  
an unshakable, infallible  
certainty of occurrence—  
that it not only has been decided  
but that in deciding it has been determined  
that it would be, and not only would it be  
but it be, has been, and always has it been.  
All there is left to be is its experience,  
yet its experience requires your determinance.

You ask about the sportsman  
who trains, who competes,  
who rivals their adversaries.

“Who is the one to win  
over the other when the other  
can also be the one who won?  
Is winning happenstance  
or circumstance?”

It, it-it-it,  
it is an illusion.  
It is unreal and unseen.  
It is unknown until known.

You stand there on  
the field of competitors and  
you take up your arms,  
you dual,  
you strike,  
you are dealt blows,  
you whinny with the horses and  
grimace with the pain, but  
as much as the sport is a game  
with its set trials and set times,  
you set your place and ready your mark  
no different than the projectionist  
loading the next canister of film,  
rolling the reels of which were directed  
without you. This is how it is for exactly  
as long as it is.

We run, we lose, we eddy down  
into the currents of mundanity  
with no set direction but the wind,  
until we ship our rudder, till  
the chord of our life is struck,  
the heart is sound and  
the plane of our undetermined infinitude  
involutes into the tunnel of our determinance.

From our aimlessness draws forth  
a fixity of mind, cannon fodder,  
shooting us down the barrel of  
our dogged certainty that grows  
in its own determinance as the chute  
closes in towards the singularity of truth,

the truth that determinance  
is the plow of God that  
when readied can open any heart  
for the harvest of our dreams.

But drive we must to spur these oxen.  
Furrow our brows and our fields  
that our tarheels not retreat  
into complacent sand.

Instead, roil every ember  
in the firebox of your soul  
that your determinance  
be found, be felt, be realized.