Mike Young – "ONE FUTURE DOES IT ALL"

from The Stuff Left in Parking Lots by 90s Meg Ryan

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lyrics

ONE FUTURE DOES IT ALL

Someone took the couch. I hope they took it
back to let my rivals crash after the stage lights
have burnt out, long after they answered
incorrectly: “For no points at all,
what’s the most comfortable language?”
Reupholstered it in cucumber peels.
Gave it cushions that gather you in
like making out without philosophy.
We’re tired of staying right here,
but not of staying. All the way home,
but you can never figure out which way
it should face. I hope they let anyone sit on it
who’s on my list: dads with eye patches,
nerds with CCCP t-shirts. No, I insist.
That’s not history, it’s a foaming tablet.
That it shrinks collapsingly, as every middle
gathers all there is from the hoax of approximates.
Plus a stack of atlases, to fix the leg. No actually
I hope it slid right off the truckbed, no bungee cords,
onto an airstrip dotted with radishes, into a soggy
new poem about an airstrip dotted with radishes,
that truck truck truck of legend skidding through six
poems a trip, O restless diet, driven by a forced-into-
retirement preschool algebra tutor who signs up
on every service to post that she’s the next Buddha.
Her clutch pedal is a squawk I’ve never fallen asleep
forgetting. Get up and circulate. I hope they need
the rest more than you and I do, because that’s it
for couches. From now on find me by the window,
stiff as a pet who can't rank dangers. If you can’t see
what I'm seeing, go ahead and make it up above me.
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MIKE YOUNG is the author of "Look! Look! Feathers" (stories) and "We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough" (poems) and "Who Can Make It" (chapbook of poems) and, forthcoming, "Sprezzatura" (poems).
He edits NOÖ Journal, runs Magic Helicopter Press, and writes for HTMLGIANT. He lives in Northampton, MA.