Mixed Mode

The experience of leaving
one category for another, 
of smooth being colder
than rough and of
that December I suffer
as the experience of leaving
one category for another,
using life that way
that opens and stops
moving, done,
furtively waving
as with one month
that opens and stops
among the others,
waiting and waking
in a place which seems filled
with restrained abilities
that experience that
has never seemed to me
to arrive before night
except as the need
to want to live
and want to be dead,
using a life that way,
face first, name gone,
and coming to
among a rival's things
Credit

From Green and Gray, Copyright © 2007 by Geoffrey G. O'Brien. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.