There's nothing but me in this world.
Still, there's a longing for what is not:
The wife across the street
Who seems to exist, enough to create
The stars and the sea around me
...But then the lights go out
And still it's dark.
The rain seems like something
But it is only the cinders
Of what used to be,
What was created here along Humane Way
In houses worthy of pleasure not paint:
Joyous barbecues over the freeway
Where on a good day one can see peaks with snow.
Only the past is real, what is here now
Is a theory. What will it be?
The elephants the children see
Rising from the mist
Are just some Hindus from Pomona
Selling frozen rats for albino pieds,
Trying to turn the fern chameleon blue.
