Pittsburgh police said a detective shot at his own reflection in a mirror while chasing a drug suspect in a dimly lit house in Pittsburgh's North Side.

Tell me the dream about two kinds of decay

                        you leading me

                        through tall stalks of language,

                        the density of a memoir,

                                    each word pretending to be a smokestack

                                    or a lamp, whispering, “dead, dead,

                                    dead,” each word repeating.

                        One professes not to know its gender.

                        One becomes a makeshift laboratory.

                        One is a picture of water running out.

                        Every other one is in enormous pain

because the army is filled

with little boys.

            At the curtain: I am ready to accept the mouth of

                        another customer, diddling his shape

                        that grows impossibly against a model universe.

            At the curtain: I am ready for a complex series of dots

                        and dashes, pleasing back and forth

                        the bare sound of naked

                        feet on canvas.

For the censure of the last two scenes

                        I cross half the distance of the remaining stage

                                    and without turning your head from

                                    the audience

you speak.