Light Bulb: Lares

Not clear to my soul. The ways to it clogged

With a debris of cage: booths, chairs, walls that dogged

Shadows I hunted day in. Or worse, the ways overgrown

By these objects, which are as much flesh as my own;

I sit, a chair-like object in a chair,

Read by the light bulb, whose paralysed stare

Tricks the small pretensions of the place.

Gestures of a room: the servant face

Of tables; cigarettes that would be human and whistle

Something under ashes; myself; curtains like wrists

That hesitate a sentiment but fail

Against the crucial dark and the arrested hail

Of lights that ward the city.

Mazda! Mazda!

In the next state, which is mountainous, a river

Smoulders continually over winged drums

Whirling toward accidents of wire and partial vacuums.

Something, it is not water, diminishes,

Comes burning to this far-off emptiness.