WAFFLES

All the crummy things that happen
on a day-to-day basis—a perfect beer
ruined by the barman’s dirty finger-
nails, standard humiliations by unseen
masters on the phone, Suburban
Ubiquity Vehicles jamming our way
from here to there—are not redeemable

like a coupon or bad boy’s erection
in Catholic school. Likewise, larger
degradations are hard to remove
from the rug once the stain has set.
Proxy wars, general banditry under
the guise of insurgence, dimestore
massacres, elected anacondas—

a toupee to hide our moral baldness
would dwarf the polar icecaps. Scale
only speaks to the decimal point. Essences,
unchanged by amount, won’t boil out of soup
despite our reducing and reducing. All
such miseries—including divorces mixed
into infants’ formula, blank-disk kids

jacked on joystick killing games, undone rents
pushing Ritalin or smacking kids or
smacked-out themselves, or gridiron hamstrings
popped—all such efforts need tonic and fizz
to quiet contemplation’s turning stomach:
a golden crisp but not yet burned Sunday morning,
dripping with syrup, a trampoline of waffles.