If You Could be a Genie

If you and your pleasure-seeking hands
could figure out the secrets of the magic act
your brain does daily in compacting every
minute, every smell, every color, all the self-doubt
and confusion, down into a hollow
no larger than a bread box, you would never
need to pay rent again. If you could harness
and master the precise application of the simple
but highly complex power of memory, you could,
for example, take a vacation in something
no larger than a suitcase. Or, after memorizing
every name in the phone book along with
your breakfast, you could terrify each new person
you met with your seemingly uncanny
telepathy. One lucky day, in fact, one such
person might suddenly go insane from the
shock and be forced to vacate their residence,
which you could then quickly (and legally?)
inhabit. Hell, you could take that apartment
and stuff all the greatest cities in the world
into the bathtub so that when the universe
of the living room got too massive to
comprehend, or reached its final heat-death,
God forbid, you could casually slip into the tub
at just the right time and bathe yourself in all
the parts of life that really matter, the wine,
the scent of a woman, the pulse of city streets.
Or go out for culture, okay, go out for finer
things in those cities if you want, the opera,
whatever, the point is, most of all to think of
the limitless compassion you could finally fit
inside your frail, pathetic figure. You could
stuff it on in forever, alongside the understanding
of it, and even, finally, the real desire for it.
Think of all the time you could save, take up in
your arms all the time in all the known universes
and store it in a drawer next to your bed
in your new apartment. Take a little piece out
every so often when you need it. Take out
that one extra day necessary every now and
again to make things right, and make the right
choices, given the chance once more,
to give yourself completely to the people around you
who are standing there waiting and dreaming
exactly the same dreams too.