Pain ricochets around my skull
like an aspirin commercial from the sixties,
darting up the nasal passages, up behind the frown,

the temporal bones, clutching at God
like a desperate spark. He bound you to him
by a chain of such longing. Ridiculous,

pressing and pressing the button for an attendant,
aching jaw, temples throbbing. When did they start
locking everything up? Do I need something,

this man wants to know. Contact lens solution,
root touch-up. Where is my mind?
my mother said this morning. Is Daddy dead?

How did he die? Do not fret after God, my book says.
Well, I do fret. I’m fretted as a guitar, picking out
the same chords, arpeggios of dread wandering 24-hour chains,

rehearsing my facts—one big cloud of forgetting.
There are 300 muscles in the face. The time bone, the temple
is called, where our hair grays first. Why aren’t the aisles marked?

My God, what is that shrieking? The man doesn’t work here,
he says. Reconcile yourself to wait in the darkness.
What did I think spiritual desert meant? Surely not that

lump of nothing I was an hour ago on the couch, wielding
the remote, spooning mango sorbet out of a container.
It should feel, I explain to the self-checkout screen

(how did I get here?), punching in my customer number,
more important. What saints felt. A dreadful hunger.
If you need help, the self-checkout voice is saying.

Todo y nada, todo y nada, it whispers,
here in the aching all-night fluorescent.

This is drawn from “Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?”