Last night, I dreamed a series of numbers.
I don’t gamble, don’t play the lottery at all;
they meant nothing to me.  Some dreams
don’t mean anything to the person who has them,
and when it happens to me
I wonder if I had someone else’s dream.

I have high cholesterol, I know; that’s my gamble,
along with my fat-assed lifestyle and of course
the steady diet of smoke.  This morning I wiped out
every egg, piece of bacon, and hash brown potato
in the house.  I feel great; that’s my dream, always,
to feel great.  Even if just for a moment. But I’m almost
out of cigarettes, so “not great” is looming.
There’s a lottery machine at the convenience store
where I buy my butts, so perhaps I’ll try a new dream
while I’m there.

It’s easy to say that I’ll play my numbers
and try to better myself that crazy-odd way
and maybe I’ll get everything I want all at once.
But it won’t happen.  I’m not that guy.  I don’t gamble
except on an early death by heart disease or stroke,
and that’s not really a gamble: if I do this, this will happen
at some point is a near certainty, something
to look forward to like

next month’s elections, about which the morning news anchor
said, “in one month exactly, we may be electing
a new crop of leaders.”  This must be her dream,
it’s certainly someone’s dream that such a thing
will happen.  It’s not one I share, by which I mean
I’ll believe in their leadership, or that it will be
all that new, if I live to see it, and as I crunched
down the last bite of so-good, so-deadly bacon,
lit an oh-so-expensive-and-dangerous cigarette,
I confessed another dream to myself

that I had sincerely hoped I would not.