You can’t be the reason I’m having trouble paying my electric bill today

The Survivors, a drawing by the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, was used for a peace congress in The Hague, Holland, in 1922.
The survivors say: War to War!
The text on the right side says: Do not teach the children to glorify the war and war heroes; teach them to despise war.

Electric Bill

having trouble paying my electric bill today,
It’s not because of another drained swamp in the guise of my account
Not because i’m with Inaya in Gaza, i tell you– this, I am–
but because by the skin of my teeth I am not Inaya in Aza.

having trouble paying my electric bill today
and why is the gas guy doing me this undeserved service
of knocking on my door instead of disconnecting me?

having trouble getting around to the electric bill today not even
because I aspire to anarchism or libertarian ism  tho I advise
Pray for the peace of the government, for without it
men might eat each other alive.
What is meant by govern men if it does not prevent
men from eating each other alive? There is this dust of us:
are laws infinitely pliable, or a scaffolding to petrify fear?
I know the idea of paying my electric like seventeen ways of looking
at a blackbird. Mort, you and I don’t know one another, so you can’t be

the reason I’m having trouble paying my electric bill today,
I’m frothing at the mind, head on the head, a cup runneth over,
Eureka, a state of boundless choice, for the angel of sheer possibility
set cruise control to seventy, dropped it all on me and left
Chelm high and dry. A historic moment of intellectual crowding riches
and a stick even in my unremodeled rental. lone plastic tree in the lobby.
People of Nineveh, don’t draw the shades of your minds before

our first tentative conversation I’m having trouble paying my electric
Bill today. If I should, what then would shape me to a candle?
Let me be the discourse between light and oxygen in which
i’m the tarte de’satre I cannot  pronounce, in painful love
with the Gemara, in love with people who are vigilant to the cost
of communal toilet tissue while privately throwing weddings for orphans
and supporting a citron a kumquat a dwarf lemon with
the indulgence of pet-owners. Uncle Mort, I’m an ancient papercut,
a seven-branched candelabra upside down, head in heaven

and pouring oil. I forgot momentarily to pay my electric bill, or it’s
the yo-yo of my mind in the age of internet, for my eye keeps snagging
on the invisible glint of someone’s stories, I tell you, it is an act of passive
resistance in a little battle between my mind, my mind, and the lightning rod

of my heart- I will be late, I will have trouble paying my electric,
tell me there is another way before I become so girded with armor
and the cowboy hat of my six-year-old self, that I take the Northwest
Territory, all of your copper mines, Lake Kinneret, and the Poconos.