Lunchbox Poems

No one can wish nothing.

Even that death wish sophomores   

are nouveau-glib about

reaches for a change of notice.

“I’ll have you know,” it will say   

thirty years later to its son,

“I was once widely recognized

for the quality of my death wish.”

That was before three years   

of navel-reading with a guru   

who reluctantly concluded   

some souls are bank tellers;

perhaps more than one would think   

at the altitude of Intro. Psych.,   

or turned on to a first raga,

or joining Polyglots Anonymous.

One trouble with this year’s   

avant-garde is that it has already   

taken it fifty years to be behind   

the avant-garde of the twenties

with the Crash yet to come.   

And even free souls buy wives,   

fall in love with automobiles,   

and marry a mortgage.

At fifty, semisustained by bourbon,   

you wonder what the kids see   

in that Galactic Twang

they dance the Cosmic Konk to.

You will have forgotten such energy,   

its illusion of violent freedoms.   

You must suffer memory

to understanding in the blare

of a music that tires you.

There does come a death wish,   

but you will be trapped by your   

begetting, love what you have given,

be left waiting in a noise

for the word that must be whispered.

No one can wish nothing. You can

learn to wish for so little

a word might turn you

all the bent ways to love, its mercies   

practiced, its one day at a time

begun and lived and slept on and begun.

JOHN CIARDI