When I’m not feeling so good

I go back to the dimestore of my youth

where they sell all forms of prophylactic against despair

and I sit at the fountain, on a vertiginous barstool

and pop the hectic red

balloon– it once contained the price of dessert

and a fortune.

Now it releases a Monarch, stained-glass

beating its way to heaven,

a map detailing a planet that could not resist

the sun’s gravitational pull,

or a code of oval figures, whole and lonely

once the enemy moved to Albany.

I wander the aisles of ideology

while finishing a questionnaire

and I sample the rhetorical flourishes

with a feral tongue.

My only answers are prime numbers,

because they are so clean.

Before I’m done my toes are filthy with falling

bodies, the detritus of dystopia – I can barely

scrape them off, I can barely prop them up

so I leave in a huff, arms laden with misfit

theories no on can stand, and I am

their viceroy, I am their Sandy Koufax,

I am their bag of chips.

I consult the bandaged palms,

their fronds behaving like odalisques.

Have they no shame?

An armada lines my street,

named for a fallen general in another war

between action and reaction.

Those soldiers felt pain in both shoulders,

which I diagnosed as a crisis of origin.

My history, too, has amnesia

and my cabinet members – or cabal, depending –

pressure me for my provenance.

Later, I say, we are later.

And: I have never been to Provence. 

I read my teenage diary entries, and find

my pelf of wandering passions consumed

by the mealy bugs of time. I find I am

accomplished, my land fecund, my culture

advanced: my tourists perambulate flawlessly –

we have been working together each season,

so they understand the proper homage

paid each site: here’s where I flocked,

I fled, defrocked, here’s where I just

can’t remember: all marked with plaques.

My natives reward their good behavior

with ritual facial ticks. We sell regret-

scented potions that go down like a bolus.

I freight a Shaker chair on my back up

Mount Blue, because there is nowhere to sit

in nature. One gets explanations only when sitting.

I fill my cheeks with water and practice

discrete swallows, as I am descended from camels.

It limits my conversation but all I know

is the chair, my life’s work, having stolen each rib

from various Adams and whittled them to symmetry.

The legs are piney stumps of remorse

sacrificed for books’ florid signatures.

It is worthwhile, even if they are pulp.

In the end, someone always carries me down

the mountain. Carry, oh

carry me down.