Failure in the Festered Front Room of the Lab Coat and Justice in the Nuclear Winter
I’ve watched yellow machines
destroy houses I’ve rented,
or crashed, or followed
the French Open in the festered
front room of.
And when I stood across the street
or once when I stood in the former
yard and felt the foundation crumble,
I, the finite but underscored
self in the world miasma,
lingered like looking for something,
like lost for a moment, like awed even maybe,
and then went to work
on the way to my degree
of this higher mind injustice
that fenced out those not of the island
or the settlement, but still fed me
by the forty-nine cent can
of field peas and kept
the conditioning prefixed by air.
Which cooled my disease
of the falling houses
but about which, poverty
is the more appropriate diction.
And anyway failing
is not so much the new
of a bad backhand
or a bathroom that became a parking lot
or a final exam in Japanese Civ
or dilettante sexual practices
or that Yale course on Game
Theory, but a grand collection of factors
which, in their application, flounder
mathematically.
Similarly, success multiplies
the failure factor by grand degrees.
So, years later, in the city now,
I watch MD residents in white
coats walking to work
in the morning thinking hematology,
perhaps, while collecting
the street’s bacteria to bring back
to a lab bench at best and a patient at worst;
Diseases loving the hallways of hospitals always
regardless of how important it is to appear
doctor-like while walking to work.
And I guess this is just
a poem about falling houses, pressure build-up
and release, which is just.
But this is also a poem about false
appearances, matriculating into a perverse etcetera
because I learned, huddled beneath
a pointless desk, Nuclear Winter,
when I was 9-years-old, which is to say:
failure
and this, too, is just.