white hope
hot lead
a banana bandana and your
what the heap said to the eagle
and then the news
I want nothing of

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem”

First it was everything and then it was nothing, though it was the same language we were using.

— Renee Gladman, “Five Things”

“Beyond the intensification of many forms of waged work, the burdens of unwaged domestic and caring work have also increased, both because of the pressures of neoliberal restructuring along with the double day, and because of the increasingly dominant model of intensive parenting presented as what is required to develop the communicative, cognitive, and creative capacities increasingly necessary for reproducing, let alone elevating, the class status of a new generation of workers. Given all the ways that the institution of the family—on which the privatization of reproductive labor has been predicated and sustained— is so clearly not up to the task of assuming so much of the responsibilities for the care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, the refusal of the present organization of reproductive labor may have much to offer contemporary feminism.”

— Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work (bolding is mine)

“Write a letter with nothing but regrets.” —- My notebook says Riley Hanick said this.

Another way of phrasing things might be accretive, namely:

the intensification of many forms of the burdens of caring for the waged work of neoliberal restructuring;
because of the intensive parenting involved in grooming the class status of the new generation
assuming the institution of the family is present in the privatization of the refusal to develop a refusal to develop

Avoid “me” and “my” when you can. In memoir, don’t say, “I remember that in my childhood nothing happened to me.” Say, "In childhood nothing happened."

— Donald Hall

Linda Gregg says her student’s journals “fill up with lovely things like, ‘the mirror with nothing reflected in it.’”

According to my journal, it is cold, the heater is broken, there is no repair to be had, and Dan Beachy-Quick believes a poem “reaches through the little hole in the eye and puts the thing in mind, that realm in which perception and forgetting are simultaneous, where every presence coincides with a corresponding absence, where experience, as in an old iconic painting, holds aside the breast of its garment to reveal not a burning heart, but a nothing that pulses and is on fire."

Nothing is ever resolved, not to a sufficient
degree of accuracy. Not speed or location. Not 
the numinous image of the dead soul ascending the stair.

— Jaswinder Bolina, "You'll See a Sailboat"

But names matter. “Gaustine meant nothing to local people, so they changed his name to Gosho, Downtown Gosho,” according to Grigori Gospodinov.

Not speed or location but something closer to the hue of motion, that smear humans become when chasing a toddler across the sidewalk. You’ll miss the choo-choo! Come back! Screaming like fire-engine red and firmly believing in this strategy, since the only sound that mattered to him was the Choo-Choo and any neighboring words were there to scaffold the Choo-thing, to build context for screaming the train cartoon sound in the swarming vicinity of suited professionals that liked to eat at the bistro near that horrible intersection. My face on his shoulder, picking him up, his finger poking into my ear, beating out a rhythm, ‘choo-choo’ to accompany my steps.

The brown flecks in my mother’s eyes
became my own, my son’s, through adolescence.
The body knows, at most, an octave
of desire that meets the air sometimes
for nothing. Just thinking of your hands
I can go wet, or dreaming, come
in my sleep, and wake to a day
in which all men are liars, wearing clothes.

— Deborah Digges, “To Science”

I could sink to anything. 
I think I could kill.
I think I have killed
for the shape, the sheer 
body of this poem. 
Look how beautiful, 
feel how impossible,
this slender, limned thing 
weighing next to nothing, 
saying next to nothing. 
Saying everything. 
Everything.

— Paul Hostovsky, “Love Poem”

Light clarity avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn't love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem” (from 1959)