Post office, office,
three women handing out envelopes
the way priests hand out ashes:
same smile, same dust.

Museum shuttered, of course.
We choke down barbecue
tasting of someone else’s vacation,
then bribe our tongues with chocolate
that melts into the same old nothing.

Dear friend,

Your disasters were vivid,
your coffee too dark,
your dancer too married to the dance.
Regrettably, we’ll pass.
May the next gatekeeper
be kinder or blinder.

Dropped at a curb that isn’t mine,
while someone else raids Hobby Lobby
for glitter to spackle the cracks
in the American Dream.

Casting call: warm female voice
to play God-for-$40-an-hour
and remind the depressed
to hydrate and breathe.
Must sound like she’s never
wanted to die herself.

Chuckie’s brand-new knee
betrayed him on the first step,
staple torn loose, blood,
a machine now vacuuming him
for fourteen obedient days.
His wife is a ghost doing triple shifts.
He says he’s “feeling pretty blue,”
as if that were the problem.

Meanwhile, in Italy,
two Victorian lunatics
won the long game:
their peacocked palaces
still standing, still ridiculous,
outlasting every body
that ever begged to be healed,
or at least beautifully lost.

I stand in the parking lot
blowing smoke cathedrals
into the indifferent cold.
They collapse instantly,
quietly, politely,
the way all my best work does;
nobody bills me
for the rejection.