"I could've sworn there was something I needed to tell you.
But now I only feel my face and neck burning
in the corrugated tumult of bright sunlit afternoon,
I'm wearing a t-shirt and jeans, not a suit and tie.
And nobody seems to care.
It's green, late April.
All of them sleeping through my lecture on spring.
And it's also when I realized that the motorcycle
cop up fast behind me on my way to work this morning
was a bad omen.
After that, even James Schuyler couldn't save the day.
His poems, I said, are beautiful and shy,
full as my eyes are full of dogwood blossoms
and fog radio voices, not catalytic converters
and omelets for breakfast when simple scrambled eggs will do.
In a dream, I loved a girl, but she exploded, said my friend
Scott Dennis, over and over.
It was all very innocent.
But how distraught it made me.
I have a feeling--
and this is me again speaking in the present--
that I am failing vividly or I'm not enough revelated
or I'm just not.
The gloom inside me hits the sidewalk
as the shit hits the firmament and sits there.
I'm no ostrich.
I can take a punch.
Mine is only one vision of paradise tossed,
a kind of asthmatic misery, a kind of aesthetic grimace-ry.
Welcome, forbearance, to the tree house
of my disappearance, my delight in substance,
my bearer of walls.
When my wallet falls out of my pocket,
I have, I realize suddenly, a million and a half things
to lose but not one of them is money.
Not one of them matters in the eyes of the world.
I mean, that is, if the world even
has eyes, which it doesn't, or if the world has
a clue, which it never will.
And by the world, there, I almost mean God.
Dear sir, I have a question.
Do I sadden myself?
Or is it you in charge?
Among the bad dreams of exploding
true loves and bad omens of lawmen and amid reports
of another teenager missing in Florida,
another car bomb in Baghdad.
These words, a fragile construction,
may in fact collapse on my head at any minute.
For Christ's sake, somebody give us a break.
It's spring."