One day, you think how the world goes down.
You might spin your dream plan to hide out,
To ride it out, off the grid. Yeh, that.
Take your kid. Your fad-trained, fun-skilled kid.
Most things you prep for don’t go down.
Most things you schooled for you don’t use.
A few you do. A few you skipped.
Those haunt you like ghost aunts, old scolds.
If you’ve got a kid, you sweat
What it is the kid should learn.
What a kid sweats won’t go down.
What kids most want to skip counts.
It’s hours. It’s months. It’s years.
You’re old, and your kid’s grown.
More cards than you could hold
Fall to a few-card hand.
What should you do now?
You scold your kid’s kid.
Your sibs’ kids. Your sibs.
Who’s the ghost scold now?
The game goes down.
Not what you thought.
Let’s get you prepped.
Just a few more
Things to go.
Your cards shrink.
Two more rounds.
One more.
You shrink
Down.
It would be nice to be
Like a golf course or field
Patch of dirt or town square,
A place that used to be
Groomed and swept, clipped or scraped,
Neat, well-used or kept bare,
That had been left so long
The grass, woods, or sand
Had come back to hide it,
So that it was lost, while
The ghost of what it was
Gave an edge to the green
Or the dunes. It would be
Nice to be the site, good
To be that ghost, what’s left,
So long as it stayed left,
So long as no one came
To search out what it meant.
The poems of thought,
The thoughts of poems—
No one counts on
One much for both.
You’ll need a fool
To try to break
Truth from that art,
Grace from those rules.
You’ll need a stack
Of grifts to braid
A con so long
It sticks that mark—
God’s luck at Dice,
A Way with Truth,
Thing that can’t be—
A great poem’s proof.