No Beautiful Thing Without Much Labradoodles

In this poem you’ll find hot sex, 
nip slips, and epic skating fails; 
you won’t find a grown man 
weeping over roadkill, or
sneaking up on you with blow darts 
of iambic pentameter. In this poem, 
positive visualizations are helpful, 
but no one ever warns you that you 
can grow up to be Rudy
Giuliani, or Ruby Ridge –
that there are no save points
or re-spawns, though spellcheck
did fix the poem so it read
“no beautiful thing
without much labradoodles” 
which proved its point that hard 
work is not always the best:
just ask John Henry or Marie Curie, 
Bernie Madoff or Adolf Eichmann— 
or the Nobel prize-winner
whose best seller rank is 1,080,008 
on amazon. Meanwhile, the trick 
to having a good beard is
staying very still and avoiding 
hair salons & employment,
while the trick to a good waterfall 
is having a secret cave behind it. 
A poem is like that too:
the cold shock of there being no 
4KHD or nachos, then
suddenly you’re in a room of
pleasant darkness
with all the people you’ve 
ever loved and lost touch with 
out of lazy life inertia,
which is why I spin tops upside 
down, why I maintain a wolfiness 
level of at least 1.5%.
So kids just starting out on your 
long acquaintance with despair, 
read more poetry—
you too can become one of 
those signs with many arms 
pointing to every place of 
greater interest, Paris, Sydney, 
Jupiter, the Titanic’s wreck, 
like strangely your despair
is both nowhere 
and a secret center,
the way black holes hold 
the galaxy together.