Crib Notes

Today I shall explain my life.
(There’ll be a test – rife with invites
to meander freely: keep this poem
as its crib notes.) First, I seek
the most of what I guess I would
suppose is “rest” from nine to five,
and am what seems most generally

thought of as “awake” from five
to nine, which dovetails somewhat
with a lot of you (I find), but
dreaming’s seamless in me with
the fecklessness – or breathlessly
theatrical effects – of what comes
after it: and since I now require

not just feasibility but paradise,
which needs of course a system
galvanized to the production of
a quite exacting bliss, the quantum
kiss of which I’ve come to think of
as (at least) a nine-dimensioned
game of dice, I must make nice

with every point of consciousness
I can, which is precisely why I am
the sort of man who has to be alive
from nine to five to nine to five to nine.
Sometimes I am so bedazzled
by the buzz up, down my spine
I can’t wait quite as long as that:

the Universe connives so! – blibbles,
skuzzles up and relegates me
to its zoo of love-bugs, snuzzles
me around its golden floor, gets flirty.
Then five becomes four-thirty.
Here’s the test. If I could bundle up
with anybody, who’d be best?


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