10 a.m and I'm
standing here holding
someone's Best Buy receipt
from
1996.

Suck me back through the
automatic sliding doors—
were they automatic by then?

Suck me back like
a pneumatic tube at the credit union's
drive-thru.

My overripe body is the retroactive
glistening
deposit.

When I awake by a voicemail
10 minutes before my actual alarm
from a woman at some doctor's office
asking if I, a doctor, have the
test results for a certain patient—

I wish that I did.

I wish I could do more
for
everyone.

Let me be the newly trapped
housefly
that got in through the crack
you leave in the window
while
showering in summer—

when it is still full of vigor
and curiosity
to explore
the space

(like me, too, I think:
the day I moved in
some sorry March).

And though the fly
becomes anemic—
like this metaphor

undoubtedly reused
each spring
(when I rewrite the same
song
in different words

finding creative ways
to rebreak the same tongue)—
it'll growl to a halt
(the fly)
or sputter in bursts
of desperate response

to the outer world's
ghost trains and barbecue
birds
gliding with cartoon halos
above Nana's potato salad
at the glorious moment
of death.

And though I secretly
release Papa's gerbils
from the tennis court traps
before he can dunk them
in buckets
like powdered donuts
in a final
Folgers—

there is only so much I can do.

I wish I could do more
for
everyone.

Such cliches are the dreadful
housefly and train whistle
and ambulance dirges
drowsily pissing their sounds
into the hot and bothered
stillness of early summer
bedroom
at the moment
of morbid masturbation
and imagined climactic death.

Bless the cliches of joyous depression.
Bless the evictions from our holy lands.

In the petty struggles the glory is
emblazoned
on dead receipts.

There is a rash across my overheated
body
alone and outstretched
in a bed
of sunken time.

There are two wiry hairs
deriving from the single follicle.

With the creatures of summer
struggle
sweating or panting
I am married
to a single origin of death's
birth
and birth's death.

It makes no difference

and I will still smile
in ecstatic gratitude

when the next arbitrary
wonder
slips through the ever-ajar
crevice

to startle my fancy.