Entry in an Unknown Hand

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.

By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this

room. I am not asked to explain my presence

anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and

are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking

certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank——

You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non-

chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested,

but I know them. It’s like this everywhere——

they think they are going to surprise me: I,

who do nothing but wait.

Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up——

very clever.

They think that they can scare me.

I am always scared.

And how much courage it requires to get up in the

morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates

you!

At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and

refuse to go on, it’s not done.

I go on

dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white

laughter and applause,

past a million unlighted windows, peered out at

by the retired and their aged attack-dogs—

toward my place,

the one at the end of the counter,

the scalpel on the napkin.

Source: Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems (Oberlin College Press, 1998)