As soon as I am doing nothing,
I am not able to do anything,
existing quietly behind lock and key,
like a cobweb’s mesh.
It’s 4 a.m.
The voices of birds do not multiply into a force.
The sun does not engross from the East.
A fly roams the fingers on my right hand
like worms. Somewhere, in an empty room, a phone rings.
On the street, a bare tree shadows a brownstone.
(Be precise about objects, but reticent about feelings,
the master urged.)
I need everything within
to be livelier. Infatuation, sadism, lust: I remember them,
but memory of feeling is not feeling,
a parasite is not the meat it lived on.