Part I. Dusk—Pink Floyd, “Wish You Were Here,” 1975

I grabbed Gatorade on a sunbaked return home
to gawk groundward in a cloth chili pepper mask—
and not toward Tulsa’s shrapnel within paling skyline,
not to co-opt it for the sake of longing any longer.

I stumbled over my doorstep’s first Amazon Solzhenitsyn novel—
A Day in The Life of Anybody Not Doing All This,
where if “You” just had to be somewhere, then not “Here”
or even there, but away from all this, was all I’d “Wish” for still—

but if its Ivan hinted how best to cheat on my path through spacetime,
I was too worn down from 13-hour shifts on foot and sweaty
five-mile commutes to splice a day’s film to headspace.

As my apperception’s reel-to-reel flickered
like every daylight’s fade out,
no thought ever seemed enough.

Part II. Late—Keith Jarrett, “Answer Me, My Love,” Live in Munich 2016

Plodding back from fetching forgotten CVS psych meds,
I wondered, what use all those spastic obversions to response were—
such as entreaties, invocations, querying—beyond
consignment sales of cerebellum grooving out chronic aches?

What use, as two more EMSAs wailed rejoinder of anti-Siren-Song
(its primordial “Stay the Hell Back, I Lure You to Living”),
were one’s engines for craft or seeking purpose in abecedarian

spillages after inner cogency? What use was dejection
at being kicked and kicked way down in the dumps
of our regional vortex in the Great American Dumpster Fire?

What use was smearing pencil points for pretty pearls to ask
or rifle through middens of a vacant “Answer,” to have taken
stabs at “Me” or “My”, to grope around for the stuff of “Love”?

What use are such words?