“Asleep and Awake”
“Asleep and Awake” produces the Sleepiness versus Wakefulness binary. Sleepiness draws dreams whereas wakefulness does not. Being awake is comparable to dancing away from one’s dreams. The binary stimuluses the speaker’s cognition of writing: “Asleep and awake, I awake./Never having written/ What I have to say./ No poem offers of me/My central meaning.” Both wakefulness and sleepiness do not impact the connotations that the speaker derives from the poems occasioning the resolution: “ Now I move past my dreams”. Rising above the dreams inevitably splits the binary because the speaker would no longer harbor inconsequential dreams.
“Ballad of Orange and Grape”
"Ballad of Orange and Grape” illustrates the confusion that is integral in reading and writing: “How can we go on reading/and make sense out of what we read? –/How can they write and believe what they're writing,/the young ones across the street,/while you go on pouring grape in ORANGE/and orange into the one marked GRAPE –?” The man’s purposeful actions amount to confusion because a buyer could easily mistake the juice that is the ‘ORANGE’ for orange juice, and the juice in ‘GRAPE’ for grape juice. The mix up of the juice is akin to a writer authoring ideas that he/she is not convicted about. Also, the muddle that is integral in the juices relates to the binaries that people principally apply in life. The deliberate mix up infers that binaries are not determinate; they can be decomposed and mixed up.
