This is a short week at work. I ought to be busy. I’m not.

PERFECT WORLD

In a perfect world,
Roy Horn could have saved
himself. So let me say this right up front:

I am not Roy, I am not even Siegfried, and I cannot make anything disappear.
Therefore, Lord, let me give up. I will turn toward the headlines
and surrender my own head to the tiger, and

into his jaws, his ivory ridged answer, I shall commend my spirit.
I shall learn to speak in sitcom
and imagine in high definition what it’s like to be at war –

if my left eye opens,
I will wash it in a pool of agreement and dry it
with a flag.

Let me hear the roll call again — call out the names of those fated
to die for overdetermined reasons.
Think for instance of the Flight 11 passengers

watching the river passing
too close below, seated under the watchful eyes
of robots praising razors before God. Lord,

I should set their cries to music; somebody teach me
the chords to a country song. I should light a candle for them at dusk; somebody
piss me a gasoline river, pass me a lighter. Somebody

pardon me for being slow to resign myself –
I had a hard life, was raised among Masonite paneling, insult flavored rugs,
marketing for the survival of the thinnest —

I used to think I deserved a shot at redemption. Don’t I owe myself
a chance to be in the majority?
You promised once that I’d be unique; now, we’re all supposed

to be unique together. What happened?
Weren’t we supposed to be on top?
The apple pie apple of every eye?

Wasn’t this supposed to be our century, our planet, our time to shine
with the Coca-Cola glazed and handsome sheen
of the skin on a roasted hog?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still down with it; it’s just that I’m finding it harder to believe.
It’s too damn hard to think through the roaring. Everybody dies
for something these days. Somebody, anybody, even the Lord —

tell me something simple, and I’ll pretend that I like dying for it,
even as I wonder why Roy wasn’t faster, swinging the mike at the tiger’s head
and leaping back in time to laugh and laugh

at how those handsome teeth closed on air?
Why were our free will and his gleaming magic not enough to stop the blood?
Why isn’t history dead? Why are we still at war?