Late inside the pleasure dome
I lost the old dream of waking
death made possible. Stupidly
I used the if to dig a human hole.
Dark in here but not invisible. Fine
I said to the reaper, I’ll change my life.
But the state overruled. I ended
up fucking everyone lying alone
in my underwear by phonelight.
I am starting to think it is possible.
To love people when they’re
facedown. Listening to records
& crying. Well, I wasn’t just
in my underwear. I wore
a baseball cap (WW2-veteran-style)
& felt so real, so tender & degraded
w/ academic freedom, I went out
& rode my bike all the way.
It was a kind of renaissance. Having
squandered my boyhood wishing
for a dog, the size of a throw
pillow, to blur beside me as I ran
thru the gnat-haloed streets at the
start of an ecclesiastical nuclear
epoch. Where politicians spoke
poetry & the poets cheered. Buckled
under the umbrage, lungs leaf
-smoked w/ New England ethos, toward
whatever I had not destroyed in my need
to be good, I found you, Tofu,
at the rescue: two black eyes
beading from a grey pile. They said
your fur was white but in this snow
you’re the shade of a mop tossed
after the world is clean. That’s the one
I told the lady, who laughed.
For you were the only dog left
in the game. I mean cage. I mean
year. Listen. It is finally fall
in February. & I made a vow to fight
to the death in this field surrounded
by squash. Gosh—the onomatopoeia
of a vegetable could make you
weep. Could make you almost
be straight. Just for the hell of it. Somehow
a wingbone in the sentence got us
this deep in the monster. To face
the face of if. Which is everyone’s. Which
is spinning on this dustmote
o’er the town burning toward the woah
of itself. The no of ourselves. Not
enough, just to end up somewhere,
is it? Not enough just to end. Tofu,
do you think it will snow forever
now? Do you think it gets in
our “system”? How many times
have they told you you’ll never
make it here? How many mirrors
have you tried to prove wrong
only to root for your shadow more
than its master? Tofu, chances are
your mother, like mine, is too far
ahead. & the language, sometimes,
just isn’t. Listen, I am trying to say Sorry
but only the words are coming out.
At my best I was somewhere else
around here beside you. But I am not
my best, I am alive. In dog years you’re
56. Older than my mother when she lay absolute in her Pikachu blanket
pulled to chin a child again I hate
when the cliché is truer than what
it meant. For the final
disobedience of breathing. For the hermeneutic
project of wonderment—failed.
For the night was lit by
annihilation. For she gasped
before she left us.
Like a girl.
For you knew it was over. That the if
must become a zero in human
form. No matter what.
You circled & circled
the bed. Your tail the smallest white
flag. & I said Mom. Mom you made it
to the top of the rollercoaster.
Now all you gotta do is throw
your hands in the air &—
it will be summer.