America
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ball-peen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
Or whether he is just spin-doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and — this is the weird part —,

He gasped, “Thank God — those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart —

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty” —

Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cellphone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
Patience
“Success is the worst possible thing that could happen
           to a man like you,” she said,
“because the shiny shoes, and flattery
           and the self-
lubricating slime of affluence would mean
you’d never have to face your failure as a human being.”

There was a rude remark I could have made back to her right then
and I watched it go by like a bright blue sailboat on a long gray river
           of silence,
watching it until it disappeared around the bend

while I smiled and listened to her talk,
thinking it was good to let myself be stabbed by her little spears,
because I wanted to see what I was made of

besides fear and the desire to be liked
by every person on the goddamn face of the earth —

To tell the truth, I felt a certain satisfaction in taking it,

letting her believe that I was just a little bird
opening my mouth and swallowing
           the medicine she wanted to administer

— a mixture of good advice combined with slow-acting poison.

Is it strange to say that there was something beautiful
in the sight of her running wild, cut loose in an
           epileptic fit of telling the truth?

And anyway, she was right about me,
that I am prone to certain misperceptions,

that I should never get so big or fat that I
can’t look down and see my own naked dirty feet,

which is why I kept smiling and smiling as she talked —.

It was a beautiful day. I felt like crying.

I knew that if I could succeed at being demolished,
I could succeed at anything.
Appetite
There are three of us in the restaurant
where I have dinner with my friend
— me, him, and one of those diseases
          known by its initials.

There’s a recently amputated rose
in a jar at table center
and in the kitchen, just this minute,
a lobster with my name on it
is being carried toward a kettle,
which doesn’t bother me.

What bothers me
is how I imagine I can see
the virus looking out
from his dullish-bright dark eyes,
and the peculiar gusto
with which he eats and drinks,

taking two of everything,
touching all his food before he swallows it —
the bread, the crumpled dark green
money of the lettuce
entering his mouth, which keeps
on talking while he chews,

telling me how good life is now that he is
living on the edge,
now that he is tasting every bite —

until a weird contagious glow
creeps into our corner of the room,
and in that X-ray light

I can see the blackness hidden
in the tissues of the rose,
the sooty funeral procession just setting out
from the frail, veined
          edges of each petal,

and the pimples on the busboy’s chin
ripen toward their bursting
          moment of perfection.

How horrible it is to be alive,
to wake one day to feel the earth
begin to seethe and writhe beneath your feet —

the wilderness outside you pressing to get in,
the wilderness inside you trying to get out,
the tangled, penetrating vines,
          the compost stink.

And in the jungle of my brain
I can hear the thoughts now
          chewing on the underside
of other thoughts,

and under them, the humming, shifting feelings
which feed on anything,
          and under them
the ink of anti-thought, liquidly unlinking
the little chains —
and then a clicking sound tink tink
from far away

as my friend
strikes his fork against his water glass
to bring me back     tink tink
from wherever I am gone.

His plate is clean, his teeth are white,
his glass is raised. I understand
he wants to make a toast:
to Dream
and Appetite
and Night.
Man Carrying Sofa
Whatever happened to Cindy Morrison, that nice young lesbian?
I heard she moved to the city and got serious.
Traded in her work boots for high heels and a power suit.
Got a healthcare plan and an attorney girlfriend.

Myself, I don’t want to change.
It’s January and I’m still dating my checks November.
I don’t want to step through the doorway of the year.
I’m afraid of something falling off behind me.
I’m afraid my own past will start forgetting me.

Now the sunsets are like cranberry sauce
poured over the yellow hills, and yes,
that beauty is so strong it hurts —
it hurts because it isn’t personal.

But we look anyway, we sit upon our stoops
and stare, — fierce,
like we were tossing down a shot of vodka, straight,
and afterwards, we feel purified and sad and rather Russian.

When David was in town last week,
I made a big show to him of how unhappy I was
because I wanted him to go back and tell Susan
that I was suffering without her —

but then he left and I discovered
I really was miserable
— which made me feel better about myself —
because, after all, I don’t want to go through time untouched.

What a great journey this is,
this ordinary life of ants and sandwich wrappers,
of X-rated sunsets and drive-through funerals.

And this particular complex pain inside your chest;
this damaged longing
like a heavy piece of furniture inside you;
you carry it, it burdens you, it drags you down —
then you stop, and rest on top of it.

These poems are reprinted from What Narcissism Means to Me, by Tony Hoagland. © 2003 by Tony Hoagland. They appear here by permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

— Ed.