I am the strange man in my small town
who entertains hopes of survival.
It isn't as easy as you'd think.
What can I do about the middle
no longer being the middle, or
having a middle? There is no
middle here! And every day they
are working their wheel to grind it
down to its smallest, largest part.
Nor is this mere philosophy
to the weird woman in Mogadore
--there is a town called Mogadore--
who works two jobs and moonlights
as a telephone psychic and tells me
that it is most often hard not to say,
"You're fucked. We're all fucked.
The whole place is fucked."
I will string some wires between us
and fill them with starlight and eels,
and then route it out to those girls
who live in Aubrey and tell their parents
they are roommates, and down to
the man in Louisiana for whom
the Mississippi's dead zone is a cancer
of the eye, staining a pupil's black
all the rest of the world. We'll need
that woman I met in a Missouri bar,
who speaks French and is an extra,
knowing neither how to grow a vegetable
nor stalk an animal, but whom I adore
for the accent and all her myths
of the exotic and suggestions of life.
Anyone who can convert a Dodge Dart
to solar power is welcome, of course,
as are you who can find a box of
the candy bars of my youth or
Freshen Up gum, particularly cinnamon.
You will join me in longing for the return
of cheap Converse high tops and
the worldwide stoppage of clocks.
Our first task is to make sure that
certain people are troubled at night,
and stare at their ceilings until they see
starving children and clear-cut forests,
fat toddlers with cheese puffs fingers
and dairy cows giving flame-retardant
milkshakes to ex-monks and cabdrivers.
Because you can't pray the acid out
of the ocean, it's getting too hot
to sit through a baseball game,
and we're already accustomed to
living underground. We will gather
a million points of light, call our own
together at last, and hold a dance
down in the deep. The earth spins
in its grave, this is our homecoming.
We will dance in the dark, and there
will be no one left to laugh at us.