Day 24: Dobject's Baseball Hat

[Apologies to Margaret Atwood]

Snowman wakes before dawn,

laying fully exposed in a tree

molting freely, swathed in stained bed sheets

like an alien Christ;

cratered pit of a city with fuming steroids

strewn with the skeletons and leftover smut,

nightly picked over by malevolent dogs,

in a quarry for Snowman’s mangos.

The last baseball hat ever worn

was an authentic replica Red Sox cap

clung to his sun brunt head

like a crimson crown: and the last joke was obscure.

He wished he was still asleep.

The godless MarvelMen trade him fish for mysticism

like naughty children, and ask the fleshy birdman for

secrets the Almighty Crake has whispered into his broken pocket watch.

Who doesn’t understand war

or faith, or toast, or free will,

or evil, or good, or obedience,

or pain, or meat, or death, or garbage: simply

don’t starve, don’t ask questions,

don’t leave the garden, don’t eat that,

don’t believe Snowman—and revel in the thankless ruins of an illegible history,

and Crake doesn’t care.