What Things Are Made Of

Everybody Tries So Hard

16 Everybody Tries So Hard And every thing: the squirrels that have plenty of nuts, but keep on packing their fat cheeks, saving, saving— the pigeons that flap so hard to get their corn-fed bodies off the ground when Timmy runs up with his dog, trying for a mouthful of feathers, a handful of flight. The steel propellers in Cheeseburger Delight’s silver cans spin like mad to mix ice cream, chocolate, and milk into a malt human livers bust their trusses to digest, the drinkers straining to believe they’re still wasp-waisted, seventeen, life opening like a field of golden poppies in the sky. It infarcts my heart how hard they try— like the man, sweat on his pate, buttocks pumping as he puffs, “I think I can,” his partner straining, eyes squinched shut in what (good worker!) she hopes is ecstasy— like convicts who swill their putrid jail-brewed Pruno, trying to rouse a decent drunk while thousands of breastfeeding moms march, trying so hard to upset the government— panting, lugging babies furrow-faced with concentration, frantic to feed brains that will spend their lives trying to get ahead like those farmers who broke their backs growing tobacco until the court’s indignant klieg light turned on them, hundreds of lawyers, rubbed raw by law school, trying so hard to make their hard trying pay. As writs, statutes, subpoenas dropped like stogie-chomping locusts on the fields of Marlboro and Pall Mall, the farmers fought to keep their farms afloat, blowing hard into Tradition’s leaky waterwings before squirming aboard the lifeboat of B & B Worm Farms, whose salesmen promised easy money raising worms for agriculture, worms 17 for industry, worms by the billions, boring through compost, leaving “castings” to make bumper crops a cinch—worms that would do all the hard work, while the farmers could finally buy new trucks and fly their families to Aruba for some R & R, never dreaming B & B would be the biggest pyramid scam in Kentucky history, its owner dying, leaving the hard-trying farmers’ barns stuffed full of worthless worms—millions of dollars blown on worms which tried their best to find enough food in the earth they ate to keep hearts beating, bodies wriggling once the farmers went bust: compost and castings abandoned with the worms still struggling to digest the drying dust that wouldn’t feed them, however hard they tried. ...