Here's a prose poem, from Deciphering Scars (1997).
Under the ethereal haze of fluorescent tube lighting
fermenting in a liquid base of cigarette smoke and stagnant air that has become
the shared content of all our lungs
dizzying scenes
of human interaction and boredom and distraction and countless miscellaneous
encoded expressions combine to form an isolating wall of Plexiglas
too transparent
to allow me to ignore the world it separates me from
too blurred to
let me understand
this random mess
imposed on a framework of assumed order, these loose elements somehow unified,
by noise, or by action, or perhaps by mere proximity
while all
apparent contact terminates on surfaces of skin, of eyes, of the barriers that
shape us
into individuals,
define us by what we are not. This too we share in common, we
flickering bits
of smoldering ash still huddling for warmth around the chaos lingering in the
afterglow
of the Big Bang.
