through my microscope, I spend hours
looking at the interstices of a plant cell wall;
if the earth did not spin, I could endure the whole
frigid night staring through my telescope at one violently still
crater on the moon

but I eat only soggy cheerios for breakfast,
ramen--chicken flavor--for lunch, EVERY day,
and either Dinty Moore stew or cheese ravioli
for my evening repast

my toothbrush must be blue, the paste pure white
and I could never tolerate the plight, of socks slipping
down past my ankles

I love Vivaldi, Brahms, and the sound of soft rain,
but hail batters my brain like a billion ball bearings
on an defenseless tin ***

my alarm must face due north
and my bed sunset west, beyond those things
I have no peculiar request

except
that things remain EXACTLY the way they are/were
for eternity

I can't play a savant symphony
like some would expect, or do cataclysmic calculations
in my head

though I can recall,
two years and four months ago today, a gold thumbtack sitting alone
on my dead granddad’s wood work bench, and the gray smelling roll of duct tape I placed precisely three inches from it, to keep it company

and if I ever again travel 365.26 miles to visit Granny
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA, it better be there, not having dared
to move a nightmarish nanometer