Foreign Plants Grow Between My Toes

I couldn’t name a sparrow
from a line-up of birds 
nor tell you what
the ants dancing in my summer yard
do after dark 
or before it or 
during
 
I couldn’t confess
which flowers 
bloom forth
from my soul 
today—I’d have
to look them up. 
 
Most of the Romantics 
are lost on me; 
they mutter mostly fantasy,
as their worlds slip along
hazily half-destroyed 
about
and gone 
 
I’ve not attended the 
drifting of lilies 
atop oil-black waters,
nor realized the croak coral
of a toad (or is it a frog?) 
as the moon stands up.
 
And this morning 
bled through the blinds,
like any other,
cooing with
more of the same:
nothing rosy-fingered,
I’d say. 
 
I cannot perform it. 
I’m penned in
by red brick
gray moss
sleeping skeletons with sound in heads
laborless jobs
data, data, data
sweet, fremd bird songs
and nothing known at all.