Day 9: Strike Anywhere

Strike Anywhere

If only something horrible would happen; the revelation

of a child, hit for the first time, an overturned corpse

on the lawn, if only something ugly would happen

to my lover, or to me, something that would follow me

like a kid lost in the woods while I was hiking,

follow me until I died,

something that would forever turn my head fifteen degrees

to the right, and drop my gaze as if it weighed

so much that it was stuck to the rug. If only murder,

or indifference, or both. If only something fake horrible

would happen, Jennifer Love-Hewitt would be

convincingly bloody and bruised, but she'd be

standing next to her costar, sharing a laugh.

Someone, throw both shoes at President Bush.

A bloodbath. A grenade. An apocalypse

involving a very close family and unlikely travel.

If only the world would break. If Medea

would just pin her children's corpses to the helm of her chariot

and ride off into the sun.

If only a pack of men would pin my gaze to the floor

and slightly to the right, mix me up so bad

that I stutter when I try say their names, so that

I could kill one in self-defense with an ice skate

that I found, by chance, on the floor without looking;

if only I could hide their descriptions in coffee cans,

which I would fill with nails and strike-anywhere

matcheads, and I would have a public place to drop it on,

unequivocally the victim, now the perpetrator,

the lines so clear, please, God, I think they misunderstood

when you said let there be light, you meant lines,

let there be lines as unequivocal as the ones drawn

between the elbow and the palm of a veteran in a bathtub,

let there be good, and bad, and torture, and distinctions,

no conflict, no innovation, no relief, no stories to tell,

just lines and events, a chart of everything

that has ever happened, geometrical, abhorrently practical.

Let all the pain of the earth rise up into my graph paper

until it is simply math, elegant, concrete.

Let there be lines.