Circa early 1990s. This poem was clearly written after a break from poetry writing. I think I was confronting who I was now married and not nearly as restless emotionally and intellectually as I had been before I turned 30 (as context, this poem was somewhere around the 1250th, many of them truly forgettable, lyric I had written).

How Many Mirrors

While you sleep,

I wander through Bob Dylan lyrics

Seeing more clearly,

More clearly than before,

How many mirrors shine back at me

And how many mirrors shatter in front of me.

-------------------

Ten-to-eleven --

Blinking brings me back

To a task set,

In stone,

In cement.

The quatrains and couplets last

Came around here several years ago.

The turntable repeats

Dusty records once listened to in 1978

In London,

In Volares,

In desperation.

Remembering doesn't add yearning to life,

Only sharpens a way of seeing beyond.

--------------------

Still you sleep

And the rising and falling of your chest

Beckons me to race,

Race more quickly than before,

To setting mirrors shining back at me,

To letting mirrors shatter in front of me.