Bargaining

The Tennessee State Lottery
Is a bargain for anyone
Who needs a daily reminder
God doesn’t favor them.

A two-dollar lesson,
A ward against exceptionalism
Repeated routinely.
God will never let you play to win.
Work for it.

rinkl

I saw an ad for this.
I saw an app for that.

French fries are available any time.
I can drive up, walk up, take out, eat in,
Or order a pizza instead.

I don’t want a pizza.
Or French fries.
I don’t want house of game of orange is the new dead.
I’m dying of exposure to lights and sounds and tastes and pounds of cheese and bread unbreaking.

Ice is all I want, and its freedom is metered.
The city rations out the rink like it’s freshwater on a lifeboat,
Sips of two-hour sessions two days a week,
If you can make them.
And what they miss,
what everyone misses,
Is that it’s really just water on a floor.

This is the moment of any time,
And we can seize it
Together,
If we flood enough warehouses,
Abandoned, unheated,
The city will never find them all.

I don’t want to say,
it’s like Uber for ice skating rinks,
But the precedents they set will help us in court.