It's one of those days when I feel like a character in a bad Woody Allen film. Imagine being in an endlessly bad Woody Allen film and you'll know how I feel at the moment.

This morning, for instance, I was driving behind a man in a sports vehicle, a Bronco with a bumper sticker that read, If it feels good, do it. It irritated me. It seemed to symbolize everything that I despise about our hedonistic society. He pulled over to the side, parked and walked into an office building. I was tempted to throw a rock through his SUV window with a note attached to it, "It felt good."

And then, a few days ago, I went in for a routine physical and as I was waiting for the nurse to call me, an elderly gentleman with a crazed smile and bulging eyes sped in, popping wheelies in his wheelchair. It was sort of funny but weird. It turned out that the old man had taken an overdose of Viagra.

Disgusting. There's a reason why men become impotent at the age of 87.

I realize that this is a rather strange way to introduce a poem, but after reading Jorge Luis Borges' "Waking Up," in the March 22^nd issue of The New Yorker, it strikes me as being an appropriate preface of sorts.

Daylight leaks in, and sluggishly I surface
from my own dreams into the common dream
and things assume again their proper places
and their accustomed shapes. Into this present
the Past intrudes, in all its dizzying range—
the centuries-old habits of migration
in birds and men, the armies in their legions
all fallen to the sword, and Rome and Carthage.

The trappings of my day also come back:
my voice, my face, my nervousness, my luck.
If only Death, that other waking up,
would grant me a time free of all memory
of my own name and all that I have been!
If only morning meant oblivion!

—Jorge Luis Borges
(Translated, from the Spanish, by Alastair Reid.)
The New Yorker, March 22, 1999

"Daylight leaks in, and sluggishly I surface…" This is not a very good morning for the poet. Daylight is a bummer and his head hurts from a bad hangover.

"…things assume again their proper places / and their accustomed shapes." Here's a man who is dead tired of the couch his wife bought a year ago. It is a basic brown couch and boring as hell. He hates the crystal ashtray some famous poet brought from Paris and he's inclined to smash it against the wall, but why bother.

"Into this present the Past intrudes…" He flips on the television and there's Kirk Douglas heaving a Roman soldier, sword stuck like a rubber hook in his back, down the cliffs of Carthage. A pathetic intrusion. He immediately shuts the TV off.

"The trappings of my day also come back:…" He feels trapped inside the mirror, and to make things worse, he cut himself shaving with the new razor, "my nervousness, my luck."

"If only Death, that other waking up, / would grant me a time free of all memory / of my own name and all that I have been!" The man is obviously fed up.

"If only morning meant oblivion!" The poet uttered these last words while staring at his empty refrigerator. No orange juice and no milk for the coffee.

Wouldn't you say the same!?

--Jacqueline Marcus