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.)