April 9th - Living the Dream

For David Foster Wallace

When was the last time
You did absolutely nothing?

Not laying around, with so much to do,
yet procrastinating,
but honestly, truly, balls-to-the-wall
doing a whole truckload of nothing?

Like, there was just nothing to do,
so you relegated your brain
to sit back and chill, and in that
salty, sticky substance in which you floated

sent out postcards to your pals
that said "if I weren't doing nothing
I'd probably wish you were here?"
It's this kind of nothing. This one.

Not the one that flips your TV
to every baseball game that's stuck
in the sixth, one team smashing the other
while that other lays down and dies;

Not the one that makes you sit
with a pencil clenched in your teeth
staring at the lined paper on your lap
begging your brain to function;

And certainly not the one
that actually sends out those postcards,
or even the one that wishes it did,
because that's more than nothing.

No, I mean the one that just drifts,
like air, like smoke, like you,
just slacks off all systems that don't
autopilot. That is living the dream.