If you keep taking stabs at utopia sooner or later 
there will be scars.

Suppose a thermometer measured contentment. Would you 
slide it under your tongue and risk being told

your serenity was on par with a thirteenth-century farmer?

Would you abandon your portable conscience,
the remote control that lets you choose who you are,

lets you pick the right personality for every occasion?
I wish we humans cared more about how we sounded

than how we look. Instead of primping before mirrors

we’d huddle in echo chambers, practicing our scales.
As a kid, I thought the local amputee was dying in pieces,

that his left arm was leaning against a tree in heaven
waiting for the next part to arrive. There should be Band Aids

for what you don’t know; whiskey breath mints so sober people

can fit in at wild parties; a Smithsonian for misfits:
an insomniac’s mucky pillow hanging over a narcoleptic’s

drool cup, the teeth of an anorexic like a white picket fence
designed to keep food from trespassing. I wish the White-House

was made out of mood ring rock reflecting the health

of the nation. I want an atheist night at every church.
Needle exchange programs. And haystack exchange programs too.

Emotional baggage thrift stores. A Mt. Rushmore
for assassins. I’m sick of strip malls and billboards. I dream

of a road lit by people who set themselves on fire.

No asphalt. No rest stops. Just a bunch of dead grass
with footprints so deep, like a track meet in wet cement.