ninety-six pieces of paper in poetry

that’s what hope looks like
four months of lottery tickets
fished out of your wallet
out of my ragged wallet
eight or ten bucks a week
cast into time’s dustbin
not because I don’t understand
the math
but exactly because I do
I understand the math of my bleeding heart

I will almost certainly never
hit the jackpot but
everytime I buy a ticket
for the half-a-week hence
I can pretend that there is
half-a-chance that God will smile
half-a-chance at pretending
that there is a God to smile on me
deus ex loteria
all my problems yet replaced
by another set of problems

you see, I know I know
I know the math all of the math
I know all the anecdotal facts
so many lotto winners end up broke
paranoid inside some distant trailer
after having given it all away
or having it all stolen or bilked
by all the hangers-on that came along
then went when the money ran out
I know, I know the math but
it would be a fresh new set
of problems

a broke struggling artist-type
living in his childhood home again
because there’s no one else who’d take him
who would take me back
resume wrecked by chasing down
big dreams by chasing down wild women
by trying to help with ailing family
and mostly failing at it to be honest
fifteen grand in student loans and
government-assisted health care
and the weight of all this
melancholic melodramatic
self-loathing bullshit in
the ninety-six past drafts
spread out on this table like
the ninety-six lottery tickets
spilling out a busted wallet

I’d rather have a lottery winner’s
where-are-they-now special problems
than these
this self-hatred and this guilt
I can tell you, absent God, it’s less
I’ve spent years on the math
I’ve spent years on this draft

I went to a liberal arts school
for the rich asshole children
of rich assholes who were too
rock-bottom stupid to even be
bought into an Ivy League with
all their asshole parents’ money
because despite my being the son
of a factory worker and a nurse
the factory worker now passed
I thought that film was going to be my work
I thought that I could make my story last
and make my fortune and be special
but all that fancy film school left me
was all the fancy liberal art elective ability
to talk about the fancy liberal art things to
talk to rich assholes about at fancy parties
the only things they’d really sent their rich
asshole children off to school to learn
because they were born rich
they were never going to have to work
I did that math
and twenty years later, fifteen grand in debt
I’ve done that math too

but that’s what hope looks like
I’m well trained for rich peoples’ parties
to disappear away from this life
be a bohemian eccentric in some distant city
absent God, you’ve left me without a whit of faith
because I’m not an idiot
and yet I hold onto hope
because I am at least a little crazy
and yet I hold onto hope
because that’s how I keep getting up in the morning
that’s how I don’t give up
that math
that math and yet another draft of this

that’s what hope looks like
ninety-six pieces of paper scanned
with a barcode reader at a gas station
watching old high school classmates pass me by
maybe looking on my face with pity
because they know my pop just died
or because at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night
I’m in a gas station checking ninety-six lottery tickets
that bought me four months of hope for near two hundred dollars
while they passed by at my obsessive hopeless compulsive actions
looking ten years older than I did
because they had real jobs with husbands, wives and kids and I’d
spent my life at an artist trying
then watching my brother get sick
then watching my father slowly dying
my empty self, my widowed mother and
our goddamned lottery ticket hopes

and in the end
I won four bucks
there was one winner in
those ninety six and
it won four bucks
you can do the math

so I used it to buy my mom a scratcher
and she won ten bucks
then I cashed that in and
bought her another and then
she won another ten
this is what hope looks like
it’s not about the win
it’s not about the jackpot lotto
it’s about getting through to
the next tomorrow
when maybe God will finally show up
and smile