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