Resignations

What do you think about
when you’re facing the near-empty parking lot
at the end of a long day? Me,
I head for my car trying to imagine
a workless existence, days spent
on artless fantasy, nights wasted on
television and cheap ice cream. Everyone I know
wants to share their vision of this: lottery
segues to inheritance merges with reality show rewards
and business schemes. At the end of the day, after
all the lunchroom blather, we go home and keep thinking
about the report still looming undone, the meeting politics,
the kids who don’t want to pay their dues
(who seem to get away with that)
and the God-damned boss who does exactly what we do
(but gets more out of it, we think).

What do you do with your hope? Me,
I push it down to bubble within me, making
thin soup of my blood and talent. I sleep
badly, self-important in the small hours. Occasionally,
I toil over a single word and tuck it away in the desk
I keep at home in the spare room next to the dusty guitar,
the room I call “my office” to make it easier to pretend
that daylight’s cubicle is secondary to the night’s work
I spend so little time on.

What is the nature of heaven? Me,
I’ve started to think it’s a place much like this one:
a globe with a molten core speeding around the sun.
The same physics apply, the same gravity
would hold you. The only difference is in
the level of will needed to rise from your place:
in heaven your feet go where you want them to go,
even if where you’re headed is miles above the ground.
Can you imagine such a world? I can.

I can imagine that it never rains in heaven, at the end of the day
there’s a shuttle to your car, and if you decide
to stay home tomorrow no one’s going to call you
to find out where your key is or how far along you are
on that report. You’re in love with your boss, you’re one
of the scrubbed young things moving up in the world,
there’s plenty of money and plenty of time.
Your dreams become so compact they smolder
like a coal seam fire, and you’re warm enough at last.

Think about that often enough and you will barely mind
the long walk to your car, as long as you can afford
a new one every few years. There will even be days
when all you’ll want from heaven
is a better umbrella.