Gotta Bowl

I do not understand how I have gotten through one
blasted blessèd thing. Evidence would indicate I went
to school and graduated, found this job, that job,
a lover, then another, then another, muddled through
the hoggish and unpalatable bogs and fogs and barns
and sties and compromises that provide a life

with its unsavory demises and delights and lucky
and unlucky breaks: I would appear to have the right
to claim I’ve got a take on how to do it: oh! – but I am
like a baker who has never baked a cake except
through some accommodating and unfathomable law
of quantum physics that reports according to unthinkably

large odds against one, one can cook and serve a torte
by simply standing there and scratching one’s availing ass:
sometimes tortes just happen somehow – though don’t
often last. Love and writing – an exciting journey through
Bahrain! – and flushing your illicit drugs disgustedly
into and down the drain despite your gnawing longing

for the kind of promised gain that comes from their
or anybody’s magic: I stand here torte-less, off
the boat and through the rolling valley to the bowling
alley, facing all the pins I haven’t yet knocked down.
Oh, the tragic vagaries and silly willy-nilly flavors of
the bounding soul! Guess I gotta go out there and bowl.


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