SHIT I DON'T REMEMBER WRITING, part III:

My mother hated sleeping, was always hungry.
Over dinner she postulated a pill: sized like the grain of rice*
held lofty on her spoon above the chintz,** whose taker
would never need these things again.

In the lullaby of dinner table conversations,
I wanted only sleep, or even just that moment before sleep
when I listened for trees against the screens
and wondered what other people did in rooms alone,***

how big a pill would have to be to make you change,****
or against what screens I would be made to cross.
What was the life of leaves without the sun? I would hate
to be like trees at night: to be something made useless.*****

----
* My mom always talks about this pill.
**I was reading Henry James.
***A line lifted from a story about a movie theater employee I was writing at the same time.
****Willy Wonka?
*****That's the same line as a poem I wrote about love for inanimate objects:

...We let the refrigerator churn indoors with the snow outside,
as if to turn it off would stamp it useless: a grave affront
to an inanimate object—to have to live with the embarrassment of being given up on.
To love what cannot know; that was the way I knew to waste it.