Lotto

One’s lot in life
determines a lot.

A shitty lot in life?
Overlooking the freeway,
or on a toxic Superfund site,
or just too ghetto.

A friend wants to buy
a better lot in life—
a plot of land in
the mountains of
Bulgaria.

We have a nice lot
despite the lack
of mountains.

Fall in a parking lot
because the legs
you find yourself with
fail, are run through
with the spider veins of age.

A lot of things can save you: someone
to pick you up and drive you around,
a TV of infinite distraction, pharmaceuticals,
cash, and lots of it.

Don’t count on Lot’s wife:
her salty kiss only brings
copious tears. Lots.

I’d like to live near alotawater
like the Pacific or the Atlantic
or the Adriatic. Dead Sea
dead last on the list, which
has lots of other options, so.

Don’t piss on your lot if
you live in the city. Okay
in the country. The same goes
for parking on your lot.

War is not a lot of fun.
Neither is torture.
A bad lot of them took him
into the building,
and when he came out,
he was alive but no longer
cared to live. Not much.

Your lot fits into a puzzle
of millions of lots, and bumps
and grinds up against them
like the sea on a pebbled
beach, and affects them
deeply, like love or hate
or lots of other more subtle
variations on those emotions.

Watch your lot. Tend it.
Don’t curse it unless you must.

The lot of many equals a lot
of great loss with briars
and rules binding their
greatest desires—to see
the city’s destruction
and live, to kiss the wrong
rightly, to bring down
the lot of greed that makes
ruins of so many good plots.