FEVER

Like all those broken mirrors,
the front door that lies prone,
broken on its back, this is just
a brutal fact, sharp & gleaming
as a pair of scissors–that is
your inadequacy to live in accor-
dance, dully under the mousy cir-
cumstance of the punch-
clock, those signposts & ravine-
black arrows, which logically point
to the grave’s grinning, urinous
skull. What? You search?
At borders? For trouble spots?
Don’t you see the soul, the soul
hanging there like a tight-rope
walker as he seesaws on his
flimsy rope above crumbs
of the circus? To see exactly
what out of life’s gauzy school
of war? And again. In handcuffs.
What use is my tranquilized sense
of humor, given my feet are trembling
after how many steel nights, hooded
days in the limp courtyard for the men-
tally ill where (inside) you plead, once
more, of merely being touched by ‘a fever?’