Daniel, my mom would love you
to say “Academia”—almost
as much as she loves me to mutter
that bloated pasty-faced turtle-necked
Xerox-choked word. Sorry, got something stuck
in my throat: icicles of glass, or strychnine….
Ahem. Keep things in perspective, young Jedi:
survive you will.
Last I heard from you, you were sailing
the dark ship of Corporate America.
Well, “sailing” suggests captainhood—
let’s say you were a galley slave,
one in an infinite hive
of galley slaves, all of you emaciated, an inch
from the flat rim of the Earth.
Such sharp edges in this world….
In your desperate cable, all the old images
were in place: sporty ties like a flock
of urban pigeons splattering every cubicle;
the water in the cooler darkened
by the silt of senseless chatter; all the clocks
spinning in reverse like drunk hurricanes,
like galaxies tanked on gin and stumbling
home—back to some zero-hour,
some timeless cradle….
And the epic tragedy: poetry
thinning from your blood, your plasma
gasping for freedom
from a cage crafted not from iron
but from paper clips—more bendable
than what a paper clip symbolizes,
i.e. conform or suffer, i.e. say goodbye
to your useless amorous creative impulses,
your squashed duende.
O College Graduate, O Spanish Major,
be romantic and translate it: adios, duende….
But you’re not alone, so don’t bend
under the skyscraper weight of your despair.
Be careful—you’ve seen what can happen
to a skyscraper, and Superman
is dead. Like Hugo,
I’m using too many r’s, but how else to spell
rrrrrrrrr?
Don’t worry: my brother, a creative genius,
has survived in your shoes for a decade plus.
Then again, as his wife’s belly swells,
I worry that she’ll give birth
to a little tie. How would they dress it
for graduations, weddings, funerals?
Or, jumping Jesus, for job interviews?
My brother and I still plan to burn
our ties—both literal and abstract—
on some beach far away from the things of Man.
We practiced once: in a suburban barbecue grill
we fried some ties, watched the smoke
rise like pollution, our polluted lives….
Consider me, Daniel: the illustrious Mike Dockins!
Some days I wish we could trade places:
days when even a poor skater could skate
flawless eights across the pond
of my students’ eyeballs, my own pupils dismal;
days when I suffer paper cuts
on my fucking brain, paper cuts
across each mitochondrion and Golgi apparatus,
my messenger-RNA leaping cellular miles
toward some cytoplasmic Marathon
only to collapse in a microscopic heap
muttering sour news;
days when my paycheck weighs
less than my saltine lunch, less
than a molecule of Na¯Cl¯ on that flimsy saltine….
Daniel, I bet you make more money than me,
you magnificent bastard,
not that either of us are driven
by money, or are troubled by the mysterious
red and blue fibers wriggling
like worms in the hearts of dollar bills.
But money, some say, makes the world
go round (not, you know, cosmic inertia).
But say you’re in a tin can
orbiting Titan and you’ve got a $50 bill
and no groceries: you’re fucked.
O Titan, little foreign moon-planet.
O far-flung eyeball.
O contingency plan for when we burn the Earth.
O retirement home to my little corporate niece,
my darling tie of a nephew….
I feel better already. But who else
gives a flying orbital fuck
about the Space Program, about Science?
So let’s get back, Daniel,
to what people care about: daily misery.
Example: silence at the end of the day.
Example: wolves at the end of the month.
My wolves are paper wolves:
paper jaws, paper gullets—and worst—
a paper hunger.
“Come save me,” you gurgled
in your desperate wire.
But—you magnificent bastard, you terrific bum,
you poor, skinny, talented ragamuffin—
what about me?
I’ll see you soon, Friend,
in the belly of the wolf. We’ll sing
to Titan as we dissolve. At last,
a happy ending.
© Mike Dockins 2007
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