We should love the gods who don’t love us,
I’m reading in a cone of intimate light 
beamed on a yellowing page. My father’s
old book, packed and shelved unread from town 
to town, rests on my stomach like an otter
floating on its back at the center of a moonbeam
crossing a still pond will munch a horned pout
propped on its belly. Flipping back, I read 
how the gods love the good, a noun only known 
truly to those who’ve clambered into a sunlight 
of pure reason. Nothing we know is real;
even that sun isn’t the real sun. I didn’t get it
in college, so long-long-ago and so far-far-away
when I marked up a Penguin paperback 
to pass a test, but now old and sleepless, nagged
by the ache in what a cranky gas station guy
called the “prostrate” while prescribing zinc,
I understand why smarties who think too hard
get stupid. My soul will die with me, poof
from my cooling meat-unit like perfume
swept away in a gust, says the stoic I thumb 
forward to. Nonetheless, despite no quo 
for that quid, I should live virtuously and banish 
desire that only worsens horrors I sweat out 
in dread wee hours that even an earnest priest 
called “fell” in spondaic doubt. Only after a dose 
of dreary Scotus will slumber finally fall. As I drift,
possums out in black night will waddle forth 
to cozy their bellies at yellow lines on asphalt 
still warm from a vanished sun. Stately deer 
will slow-strut from thickets in single file 
to graze lawns spiked by tiny warning flags.
In this doze called second sleep all they call 
“the world” is indeed but the stuff of forms, 
not stuff at all but vague, noisome dreams 
that linger but briefly as formless fears, 
a taste in the mouth, a whiff of sour scent
that diffuses into a shaft of sunlight 
as the corpse I live in wakens.