I'm at work,

but I don't have things in order

I realize I don't live up to standards,

that I'm faking it, that I've somehow lost it,

that this can't go on much longer,

that I'm about to be exposed

and lose everything

I feel dark, desperate, bewildered,

and sense a strong urge to confide in my mother,

imagining her consoling face before me

- but there is some strange obstacle,

making contact with her hard, even improbable,

my despair rising like a wave through my chest

when, at long last, as I stand in a corridor

at the police station,

it dawns upon me that I don't have a job, since eight years;

that I'm about to turn 75,

and that Mom died sixteen years ago, at age 95

With that lucid understanding

and a sensation of utter emptiness,

I wake up in my bed

upstairs in this winter land

with a blunt, naked awareness

of the relentlessness of being,

hearing Anna, already up since hours,

moving laundry from the washing machine downstairs

into the dryer;

my feeling of bewilderment and insecurity

lingering

Working my way through this text

is a way to digest the inescapable truth

of the feeling of loneliness we all share,

falling forward in this intermittent being that is allotted