not dostoevsky’s problem

    Of paper plates and plasticware,
An unwilling bachelor is unfrillingly made.
        Ramen, McIlhenny and expired milk;
    Half his bed is paved in unwrinkled silk,
A false-luxury he’s lavished upon himself.
    Most drawers empty, save one for skivvies,
        Another for unkemptly-paired socks;
            None for the tempt-privies of a warming soul—
    Those were interred in a Rubbermaid box.
Baton-twirling bunnies barred from the clocks,
    But one honeyless key for the locks;
        He talks, tongue-in-cheek, to himself—
Just banter-hope, like dust, on a sandbox-shelf.
            After one or four whisky-over-rocks,
        If the icebox needn’t a defrost again,
    He doesn’t waste a wonder-door on when
He’ll thunder once more into wildfire-frisky;
Rather, how lately-soon they’ll cart him off
    To earthen-kin, Leavenworth or the loony bin.
        He’s not Dostoevsky’s problem,
            But a simple southwest-boy
    Clutching a wilt-given, late-spring blossom,
          As likely to wake unto sun and joy
      As the depressingly play-dead possum—
              So still, though heart-piercingly alive.
          Oh, banshee, quiet the comb for a beehive,
    As he’s alive-inside as vivid could buzzingly seem
With the torrid dreams of a ridiculous man—
        A secretly felicitous, deliciously missed,
      Hardship-kissed, singularly solicitous man—
    Dismissed for an impatient can of wishes.
  But he’s fearless that love could fade away with him;
        For should it on a death’s too-reckless whim,
    His ghost would revisit to rake the feckless seeds
            And wraith-water them green again:
              Green-again and recanvassed in color-plural,
          An ungrey mural as to why we should never be—
      And never truly are—
        Alone in this ravaged, risk-managed,
  So-selfishly damaged, artless-want world.

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