If This Is Monday

If this is Monday I'm probably knitting
a black hole I can use
as a general anaesthetic

If this is Tuesday I'm probably
feeling opinionated about something
phenomenalism or drapes

If this is Thursday
I'm probably wondering
what this everglade
is doing in my feeling
and what I might do
with an everglade in my feeling
about everglades is invest it
with salubrious minerals
and convert it
into a moneymaking spa
but that would be
missing the point
of my feeling
and the gentle impulse I have
to ball it up
into a Bauhaus
fuchsia and plant it in clay

whereas if this were Wednesday
I could simply wade
into a lilac lake
sandpapered to look like staves
or waves
or a procession of preposterous ripples
lapping a preposterous shore
of brazen incandescence
and derelict escalators

that have stopped going down
because they have stopped going up
and have stopped going up
because they have stopped going down

If this is Sunday I could be nailing
Van Gogh's bridge
at Arles to my kitchen wall
and thinking how much better it would look
nailed to Tuesday
so I could walk across it into Wednesday
and jump down into Thursday
and crawl under Friday
into the inchoate charm of Saturday.

If this is June
I'm probably running for mayor
of August
and the shimmering city
of its tall hot days
If elected I will do my best
to appear amused and interested
in flying squirrels and alyssum
and if this is July
I'm undoubtedly suffering
the effects of a long campaign
fountaining incendiary rhetoric
comforting insecure sycophants
and constructing a platform
10 cubits high, and canopied copiously
with luscious woodbine, sweet
musk-roses, and with eglantine

If this is plywood
may it be 3/4 inch plywood
but composed
as it is with words
this could be anything
this could be prose
and make blunt
perfect sense, or a watermelon
umbrella, bright red with black
seed splashes and green
trim on nylon, elegant
serving basket for bread or fruit or a longhandled
rechargeable massager
and if it vibrates let it vibrate
let it hum
with a tendency to fetishize
the feral and atypical
eject
alinguistical jism
of luminous meaning
of muscle and fluid
contractions that result in a painless
and easy dilation
of the mind to produce a fresh
perception of perception

If this is not impatient
it is not a link
but a concatenation
If this is a quart
may it also be a gallon
or a pint, or a sunrise

If this is a clock
let it tick
in blithe acceptance
of the paradox of midnight
which is both morning and night
and falls on rat
and plutocrat alike

If this is eager
to please may it also be realistic
and realize the utility
of receding into the dark
when the light shines
too harshly, and of being adamant
and openly contradictory
when insisting on the worth
of a 6-volt car battery
readymade to a dealer in fine art
and if this is rolled
around a platen my fingers are probably busy
typing a trail of words
across a vertiginous void
of incorrectly understood
as paper

If this is a plum
let it be plump
If this is a suit
of armor let it clank
If this is unbuttoned
let it reveal
what there is to reveal
and lie down and be content
and if this is a form
of government
may it govern nothing
but the tang
of its struggle to rise
into a lambent Niger
of nimble gazelle

reprinted from _Joe Soap's Canoe_, 1993