LACK
Sure seems like IKEA schemes to keep me furnished
with neediness, snagged by the cuff on greed’s unvarnished
and snarling wood grain, then bagged in a crinkly vein-blue shopping
sack ideal for laundry schlepping, DIY kidnapping, or wrapping,
like some budget Christo, interiors just nearly formed
but lucky for us, forests of fiberboard pine to be farmed
and packed, hacked and hewed to exactitude.
Hating having, hating having not, you’re screwed
on both ends, like the first and last fastener of the IKEA
LACK side table—a clean, Cartesian idea
of carpentry, its figure abstracted three degrees
from that poor nobody, buckled on knuckles and knees,
who posed (the fable goes) as the wheezing prototype
for our first table: he’d know whether the bowing top
or the lack stacked beneath matters more, whether force
or conformity forbids you to get up off all fours.
Sure seems like my dreams of the perfect remodel, modish
modules clustered flush, must speak an undubbed Swedish
and what I’ll need is unspellable, zillion-syllable,
an endlessly assembling emptiness that’s still
not done until you dust its lacquered black.
(It looks spectacular when lack looks back.)
