To Failures

To keep my work in order so as
To be able to find things
To paint the house
To earn enough money to live on
To reorganize the house so as
To be able to paint the house
And to be able to find things
And earn enough money so as
To be able to put books together
To publish works and books
To have time
To answer mail & phone calls
To wash the windows
To make the kitchen better
To work in

To have the money to buy a simple radio
To listen to while working in the kitchen
To know enough to do grownups' work in the world
To transcend my attitude
To an enforced poverty

To be able to expect my checks
To arrive on time in the mail
To not always expect that they will not
To forget my mother's attitudes on humility
To continue
To assume them without suffering
To forget how my mother taunted my father
About money, my sister about I can't say it
Failure to forget mother and father enough

To be older,
To forget them
To forget my obsessive uncle
To remember them some other way
To remember their bigotry accurately
To cease to dream about lions which always is
To dream about them,
I put my hand in the lion's mouth
To assuage its anger, this is not a failure
To notice that's how they were; failure
To repot the plants
To be neat

To create & maintain clear surfaces
To let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down
And not a table
To let a table be a place for eating
And not a desk

To listen to more popular music
To learn the lyrics
To not need money so as
To be able to write all the time
To not have to pay rent, Con Ed or telephone bills
To forget parents' and uncle's early deaths
So as to be free of expecting care; failure
To love objects
To find them valuable in any way;

Failure
To preserve objects
To buy them
And to now let them fall by the wayside;
Failure
To think of poems as objects
To think of the body as an object;
Failure

To believe; failure
To know nothing; failure
To know everything; failure
To remember how to spell failure; failure
To believe the dictionary
And that there is anything
To teach; failure
To teach properly; failure

To wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes
To write a thousand poems in an hour
To do an epic, open the unwashed window
To let in you-know-who
And to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns

To just let us know