Happiness Equation

My sister calls, says she     can’t begin to be buoyant when she burned

the last bit of pea soup,     when each gray face that she meets will die,

and possibly tomorrow     after she guides one to the toilet and then back

to his sterile bed.     I’ve heard that happiness is only a calculation,

and we never mastered     the goddamn math, that new studies now show only

forty percent of happiness     is under our control, and they say that since

I am recently married,     I am three times more likely to achieve happiness,

which is ninety percent     contentment and ten percent orgiastic peaks,

but what the fuck does NPR     know about our failures. I do what I know, and so

for my forty percent,     I listen to the Sixto Rodriguez album, I smoke

the Sugar Man’s sweet, blow     his blue pills like confection, drink cold beer in a hot

shower until the steam turns     to dead black coal, and my mind is only twenty percent

alive, the other eighty bravely     waiting like a good dog left untied outside a bodega.