More than anything
I want to write
my final poem,
one whole and perfect poem,
The Ultimate Poem.
"And these were Heavenly because
he never saw them clear enough
to satisfy his love, his need
to see them all again, again."
The first time I ever kissed a girl
on a couch, what struck me
most was not elation or desire
but the abrupt realization
that other human beings have mass
and fluids and upper lip hair
and probably feelings.
I was not a hot air balloon
drifting to cloud nine
but Wile E. Coyote, somehow surprised
by the consequences of gravity
and by my sobering reunion with the earth—
dumb, dumbstruck, awestruck, floored.
Straightening myself out,
I growled with a renewed hunger
to be wrong again, foiled again.
Two kinds of men
walk this world: the detail-oriented
and the visionary. Myself—to spend my time
tending the messy minutiae of implementation
would rob the world of the greatest gift
I can give, my fertile brain.
The war council convenes around a campfire.
Sal says, Good effing riddance.
Larry says, Burn her letters tonight.
Colin says, Get under someone else.
Brie says, Lock that door and throw the key in a lake.
Claire says, Let's all get naked and jump in a lake
of beer and forgetfulness.
Paul never has this problem
because he doesn't let feelings burden him—
he moves through the world lightly, leaving it all behind
like a trail of greasy old takeout bags and unclaimed dog crap.
"and when I heard that, a distant chime went off for me,
remembering a time when I believed
that I could simply live without it."
"Only miserable people will tell you
that love has to be deserved."
All the prayers I have left, gathered by scraping
out my skull with the most thorough spatula I own,
are those beginning with the vacuously conditional
"If you exist" and ending with an endless asymptotic descent
toward wordlessness. Undead moaning. Whoever,
whatever, if, if—Have mercy! God(s) or goddess(es) loving
or wrathful, intervene! Laissez-faire alien observers,
beam down here and sort us out! Secret government
eavesdroppers, fly-on-the-wall documentarians, awakening
telepaths in my neighborhood, emergent cloud-based
AI consciousnesses, hear my prayer! Be the savior I need.
Narcissistic screenwriter of my life, penning these petitions
in my voice, understand that you have the power,
the responsibility. If I'm shambling and mindless it's because
you wrote me that way. If I'm tragically flawed,
if in this world tragedy is an acceptable ending
it's only because you want to be edgy and get laid.
Hyperdimensional sadist preteen superbeing playing a game
analogous to The Sims, for the love of God
put the ladders back in the damned swimming pools.
We, an unsaved race called humanity; me, an unsaved
creature of said race—we're here, we're in some sense real,
and we lack the virtue to save ourselves. Somebody, anybody
out there: Hear us, intervene, tyrannically as necessary
like a responsible parent or a good Samaritan or a true hero,
hear us, save us, have mercy. Amen, over and out.
War never ends
as easily as it begins.
You get your hands dirty,
do what needs to be done
to stop the fighting—
flee, surrender, sign treaties,
drive out the enemy, burn every village,
hunt down every villager—whatever
is necessary. Do that and the fighting stops,
the skies clear,
the stand-up comedians resume telling jokes,
the boys come home
and fall in love.
I play with LEGO, so I know
everything that happens
either blows the world apart
or builds it anew, day by day,
brick by brick. Sometimes, after
the dark whirlwind of chaos—my baby
brother—arrives hurling everything
beautiful to the ground in a shower
of plastic confetti, I scramble to put it all back
just the way it was. Through tears,
guarding blocky remains from scavengers,
I turn and fit and reconfigure them
until sooner than is fair, I can't even recall
how it felt in my hand, where that piece belongs,
how it all held together in the first place.
At that moment, spinning in time, I know
in my child's imagination that nothing,
nothing again will be as good as what I lost.
A pesky dandelion field
is visited by only sev-
en Bigfoots, here to share a meal
of flowers growing on their graves.
Dear friend,