Late-Stage Capitalism

 

On Sundays I pill up all the reasons I’d be a bad partner
in separate slots for each day of the week. Still punk.

If I don’t kill me, a thousand things are waiting and will.
The sun isn’t patient, it’s gold, and yesterday’s snow

is nothing. Just water. I monitor my consumption, what
goes in and out. I monitor the artifice of measurement,

the adjustable band by which I declare not and enough.
In the room’s corners dust whispers and isn’t the least

bit ashamed to be flaked skin, dead hair. I’ve been dying
since the day I was born, all the poets say, and sometimes

I want to tell them to all go fuck themselves. Language,
my mother would say, then go back to cooking without

teaspoons or cups. All the angled edges of my life are losing
their ability to stand like that. So long. The roof over

my head becomes a sky that becomes an emptiness
without atmosphere, which I can’t help but think is exactly

and nothing like the soul. I live alone in a room with
a television that never runs out of new violence to show me.

When each pill falls into its slot in the case it makes a plop
sound and sometimes it satisfies me, all the ways I’ve made

to make meaning, to see myself as part of a system
that extends beyond my self. The television opens its mouth

to screaming. I mean it when I say it. One day I’ll have enough.