To Failures Lyrics

To keep my work in order so as

To be able to find things

To paint the house

To earn enough money to live on

To reorganize the house so as

To be able to paint the house

And to be able to find things

And earn enough money so as

To be able to put books together

To publish works and books

To have time

To answer mail & phone calls

To wash the windows

To make the kitchen better

To work in

To have the money to buy a simple radio

To listen to while working in the kitchen

To know enough to do grownups' work in the world

To transcend my attitude

To an enforced poverty

To be able to expect my checks

To arrive on time in the mail

To not always expect that they will not

To forget my mother's attitudes on humility

To continue

To assume them without suffering

To forget how my mother taunted my father

About money, my sister about I can't say it

Failure to forget mother and father enough

To be older,

To forget them

To forget my obsessive uncle

To remember them some other way

To remember their bigotry accurately

To cease to dream about lions which always is

To dream about them,

I put my hand in the lion's mouth

To assuage its anger, this is not a failure

To notice that's how they were; failure

To repot the plants

To be neat

To create & maintain clear surfaces

To let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down

And not a table

To let a table be a place for eating

And not a desk

To listen to more popular music

To learn the lyrics

To not need money so as

To be able to write all the time

To not have to pay rent, Con Ed or telephone bills

To forget parents' and uncle's early deaths

So as to be free of expecting care; failure

To love objects

To find them valuable in any way;

Failure

To preserve objects

To buy them

And to now let them fall by the wayside;

Failure

To think of poems as objects

To think of the body as an object;

Failure

To believe; failure

To know nothing; failure

To know everything; failure

To remember how to spell failure; failure

To believe the dictionary

And that there is anything

To teach; failure

To teach properly; failure

To wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes

To write a thousand poems in an hour

To do an epic, open the unwashed window

To let in you-know-who

And to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns

To just let us know