I gave the dice my name and they gave me back a stranger
He wore my shirt and used my teeth to eat
But the way he chewed was someone else entirely
Six options on the table like organs laid out for inspection
One said leave your wife, two said burn the manuscript
Three said order the fish, I ordered the fish
I'm from Halifax, I have never liked fish
That was the beginning of something that tasted like freedom
And freedom tasted like fish
The therapist said, Luke, you are exhibiting signs of
And I let the dice finish her sentence
They said four
Four means tell her you were s*xually attracted to the filing cabinets
So I told her
She wrote something down
The pencil moved like a medical instrument
Across her yellow legal pad
And I wanted to ask the dice whether I should grab that pencil
And push it through the soft geography of my own hand
But it was not my turn to want
The cube decides
The meat obeys
The cube decides
The meat obeys
And what you called your personality was just a cramp
And did I mention tension? A habit of the jaw
Tuesday the dice said be kind to everyone you meet
I was kind to the woman at the laundromat
She smelled like detergent and a life I could have entered
I said you have beautiful hands
And she looked at me the way you look at a dog
That has learned to speak
But only knows four words
And uses all of them incorrectly
Wednesday the dice said steal something meaningful
I stole a book about dice from a bookstore
The clerk watched me do it
I let him watch
Theft requires a witness or it is just relocation
Luke understood what the doctors could not stomach
That the self is a tumor you can choose to remove
Not with a scalpel but with probability
Each face of the die, a little death of preference
You mourn nothing because you chose nothing
The dice chose and you were just the hand
The warm dumb hand that shook and threw
My colleague said this is psychosis with extra steps
I said yes, correct
The steps are the point
The weight of the foot on each step is the point
The shoe is the point
And I did not choose the shoe
The cube decides
The meat obeys
The cube decides
The meat obeys
The meat obeys
The meat obeys
The meat obeys
And what you call love was just a number you kept rolling
In Chapter 37, Luke makes love to a woman
He does not find attractive because
The dice said five and five means yes
To the body in front of you
He described it clinically
The way a surgeon describes opening his 100th chest
Not with passion but with the specific attention of a man
Who has abandoned the concept of passion
And found something worse underneath it
Which is obedience to nothing
Which is the most American form of God there is
I tried the dice life for 19 days in October
Day one I quit caffeine because the dice said so
Day four I called my father because the dice said so
I told him things the dice selected from a list I wrote at midnight
Some were true, some were p*rnographic
And some were furniture instructions from a Swedish catalog
He could not tell the difference
The fact sat in my chest like a piece of bread I forgot to chew
Day 11 the dice said go to the river
I went to the river
The dice said get in
I did not get in, and that was the day I learned I was still someone
Still a coward, still a man who would not get into a river in October
Oh the dice forgive nothing
Because dice do not forgive
They are just bone and paint
They have always been just bone and paint
And the disease is this
That every morning you wake up and pretend to choose
The coffee, and the shoe, and the tone of voice you use
To say good morning to a person you decided to love before you knew
That deciding was the problem
The dice did not fix Luke
The dice ate Luke alive
And what was left stood up and went to work
And no one noticed
No one ever notices
The meat obeys
The meat obeys
The meat obeys
The meat obeys
