"Confession."
"Down in the blue-green water at nightfall
some selving shapes float fluorescing, trance-dancing,
trembling to the rhythm of theodoxical marching-music
that they hear over the mere noise of the breaking tide.
Above, stars in certain places.
Along the shore roads, cars carrying
people on uncertain errands, sordid and sacred,
and all the kinds in between.
Halogen-lit, a woman gets down from her all-wheel-drive
velocipede, enters through an obeying door,
a cyclopean store to buy unintelligent fresh fish
and other objects, whether formerly
alive or formerly dead.
She comes out again.
A poor man calls to her selling his no-news-paper.
The disastrous headlines smile and nod.
They announce the plans of steel patriots and undertakers,
ad-men and fallen vise-generals, doping their stolen crusades.
But the woman has learned, as I have learned, as all of us
must keep learning if we are to be good subjects, how
to make of a newspaper the mask of a locust.
Calmly put it on, and begin once more to eat everything up."