On Being Told I Have so Many Unread Books

I wring my hands in a hallway.

I walk in slow circles, looking for the moon.

How does one manage to use up everything in the bucket?

No one discusses the contingent funding situation.

Someone always has to foot the bill.

People return to the site of a burned homestead.

Or let a bad lover back into their bed. 

The persistence of a kind of belief in the known.

Why does the body let things happen?

I was trying to learn to thrift time.

I wanted to say, trick time.

I might be able to do this for only a couple more years.

I learn to thicken my face for more than arrows of dandelion seed.

Tell me that whoever said dead end wasn't being literal.

Does it feel as though metaphor could be the last refuge?

Come in, have a drink of water.

It might taste like rust or the mossy lining of an old well. 

All I wanted was some kind of life of the mind.