On a planet that spins because it wants to,
it's hard to have a good job.
Think of the ghost of one Jacob Marley
and his eternal lecture circuit.
Jacob Marley's gaping maw.
Jacob Marley's trousseau.
Jacob Marley's growing suspicion
that even otherworldly music lessons
may very well go nowhere.
Shrouded in nether, Jacob Marley
gets his nipple pierced
in hopes of feeling something.
Glumly he holds his hand up to the sun
and through himself watches the sky.
Thinking of him is in itself a calling.
      And I too am dejected,
and despondent, and cannot banish from my mind
the lamentable transparency
of even our noblest midnight visitations,
though without them we are stunned and lonely,
sleepers whose eyelids remain still
as a stone crusader's. And with them
we are dazed, but kept company
by the tiniest of flickers,
like the light from a distant cinema
we may never enter
but whose doors are forever open.
Which reminds me of the time Jacob Marley told me,
"Crime-lords in Jersey
own every jukebox in the world." But still.