and blessedness. Do you trust me
more than the ten-minute rush
in your head at rest—ecstatic
confusion that threatens to toss
your entire flat for the one thing
no one else will be able to find
as your back slides down a wall
in a kitchen no good for eating
or drinking. No One Deserves
To Be Happy is what the bottle
would say if its label hadn't been
peeled off at the trestle table
where our fathers thundered over
us with Bibles marked in red,
our mothers in the shadows
above the waistline and below
of the body's nine sacred holes.
Cannot compel you. What's taken
shape. There won't be enough
time, only now and now and now
which is simply the Lord knocking
softly on a tattered screen door
slammed one too many times
rusted through. And you marvel
at who'd design such things others
a Black Friday pre-dawn sale
where everyone can walk out
with wrapped armfuls no one
will want next year, be sure
of that. Nothing so consequential
man's mouth for the first time.
What comes after is what we are
bordering on shame. Because bliss
on the sly is a mote in the eye,
a Gethsemane where everyone else
in back of a wagon whose wobbly
wheels get sucked down in the road's
muddy ruts. Easy does it. Nowhere
else to get to—no place left to go.