How hollow!
did my aching slits of cold bones feel? When,
walking bleary-eyed
and fastidiously past
what I'd hoped
were my own dim aspirations, and looking,
as I often might,
for something outside my own stifling life
about which I ought
to sit later
and write—
but which, moving on these diffident rodent feet,
must nonetheless
have necessarily gnawed its way out
from inside me;
and how powerless! When—there chanced to appear
a wild blind man, feather-faced,
angry, leathery and fast,
swerving past me on
the crumbling curbstone—grumbling,
though not really at me,
something quite vivid—regarding
the very world's coming, presently,
tumbling apart.
And what then? What now here?
can I possibly write
to rise and take flight
beyond that?
What soars above him? Or,
never mind that—what lies beneath?
The truth, then. Yes, at least
that. The truth, at last—struggle
and scrimp and
evince what I might,
it will never be—possible
for me
to make
that man happy.