Often as if a moth ran into the room like that--
wing-legged athlete-- defeated
by the lamp it saw bubbling though my window...
My mood swoops down as often as this,
totally normal but unexpected. The mind is a machine
(and you knew this too, Descartes,
given how you placed the souls of us
in some specific spot of our brains;
we know now that that gland has to do with our sleeping,
our souls have more to do with sleep).
When the gears of our minds turn they sometimes creak,
and you get words with such unfitting-- the moth
again, whose parents never said before they bashed
themselves clean into night-light, you don't
have to do this, you shouldn't do this, please
do not do this and so they did this. The moth
does this as stuck gears, beating and beating itself
against the light as my own mind fails to mind
itself, and the sudden grey of it, familiar as
the glittering powder of its wings, particles floating as
a possible music of the world.
Then I flicker my eyes back to my work as if to say
how boring, I've seen this episode before.