It was a dream

It was a dream by Lucille Clifton

in which my greater self
rose up before me
accusing me of my life
with her extra finger
whirling in a gyre of rage
at what my days had come to.
what,
i pleaded with her could i do,
oh what could I have done?
and she twisted her wild hair
and sparked her wild eyes
and screamed as long as
i could hear her
This. This. This.

So this poem is one stanza long and it contains 14 lines. It is also a free verse. One thing that I noticed was that she didn't capitalized anything even after punctuation. Only one "I" was capitalized. It seems that the little "i"'s are her greater self while the big "I" was her real self. "what" has its own line but I don't know the significance of that.
We all have an image of the person that we want to be and then what we really are. Maybe the author hasn't been the person that she wanted to be and not living her life to the fullest.