Your mind
is a temple

Sweep its steps,
polish its floors

But
     Never
gauk at your neighbor
for the tidy mind
You've wasted
on cleaning theirs

our entire existence means absolutely nothing
we are so perfectly trivial
there is nothing i can do in my short short life that is even going to make the slightest difference in the history of our world
and the history of our world means nothing in the universe
we know so much less than will ever have existed
i do not want to die
there is still so much more to learn
we will never know it all
the amount of information in all the human minds that have ever existed
will still amount to nothing
when the amount of things to know
is so large
i do not want to die

My wife, a psychiatrist, sleeps
through my reading and writing in bed,
the half-whispered lines,
manuscripts piled between us,

but in the deep part of night
when her beeper sounds
she bolts awake to return the page
of a patient afraid he'll **** himself.

She sits in her robe in the kitchen,
listening to the anguished voice
on the phone. She becomes
the vessel that contains his fear,

someone he can trust to tell
things I would tell to a poem.