Your gaze has, from the passing-by of the cars,
so exhausted become that it holds nothing more.
You feel as if there were a billion billion cars
and behind a billion cars, no world.
The sweaty course of your increasingly stubby fingers,
which in ever-smaller circles trace,
something like a sigil of impotence upon your desk,
at which, benumbed, your mighty intellect slumbers.
Only sometimes the office window blinds release
by themselves, sliding down, but the image remains,
passes through your body’s inert stillness—
and festers in your heart.