Inconveniences Rightly Considered

III. The Conversation in the Funeral Receiving Line

  Dostoevsky found it when it's done,

  he stood before it hours till his

  wifey whisked him off, afraid

  he'd fly into a further epileptic fit,

  Smerdykov-like, and Fyodor's

  inspired formed a volume

  an idiot viewed it, said

  'Methinks it holdeth

  force enough to make one lose one's

  faith,' this from the man who grasped

  each broken boy

  not as he was – a broken man –

  but only as he could be

  oh-ho-ho

  someday

  therefore never saw a dying earth

  surrounding him, but mere Edenic gold –

  the true, blue Tommy Tom Kinkaide of his day.

  I. The Magazine

  'Here once more, oh laurels, and once more,

  oh myrtles brown, with ivy seldom sere,

  I've come again to pluck your berries crude

  and with rough fingers rude

  shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.'

  III. The Conversation in the Funeral Receiving Line

  Not holy in a mess, Alyosha, no

  Mishkin's much more dead than that Christ

  he saw,

  stiff,

  hanging hanging hanging

  on a wall.

  II. The Meal

  (tomato-slicing and remember these were frozen green and shipped two-thousand miles behind a diesel eighteen thirteen-gear that hauls both limes and rest-stop lizards while my grandpa's garden renders its libations scarlet fruit-worm-eaten both of 'em fresh how we pluck them early and pluck them late but never right on time)