From Notions of a Mirror (Anvil Press Poetry, 1983)

*

How to be reason, how to be hopeless in light:

Exhaustion throwing off the bad

Other proposals — letter to get off

To people of pedestrian letters, petitions

*

Somebody causes out of gas bills, idées fixes.

Falling and tardiness in keeping up

Dental Floss, feet. Highly strung times

To sit still through for long enough, guilt about

*

Times unstrung when one can’t get up

In the shambles that has somehow ended up.

Of a kitchen of the body — blisters, bruises,

Spots brought on by not changing to be

*

Bright for all efforts to prove oneself

A citizen: that has been denied fellow citizens.

Without blame. Imagination, a dirty enough

Word, an education, it elbows. And walls

*

Of the innumerable discomforts brought about.

But sleepiness, the fading eyes, the heavy.

Heavy to waste an hour, the mending

Of petty ruptures, all the tasks—

*

How to be hated, having no whine

Among children, throwing off the dream.

And power trips, and self-obliterating ideas

And scent of recriminations. Yet another

*

Pedestrian in charge makes jams.

Being so over-sensitive, falling back asleep,

Guilt about sanitary habits such as

The person who wishes you dead

*

When one doesn’t manage to do anything

Out of the chair facing the cooker

In the hotch-potch of aches in the corners

And irritating underwear. Often enough

*

To be clean and unblemished as a new advertisement,

That has been denied a citizen:

Other than imagining not having had enough

Of when one feels too old to do anything

*

About heads held upright by anyone,

By being what we are, especially heartedness

Of an infinity done over, sleep,

The semi-faint and shock blanking out.

*

A further, deeper breath of lapsing

Into oblivion. How to be swayed by

Swaying eyes disunited, blanking out to sleep

And sleep a second time again.

*

*

From Notions of a Mirror (Anvil Press Poetry, 1983)