Poem's First Commercial

Poem, sludged out of dreamless sleep into 
something less than dreamless sleep, albeit too null 
to hurt, stared at his computer screen.  
He'd piddled a few words
and phrases across it hoping one of them 
would start a band marching color 
somewhere into him.
None came close to doing so.

He'd been weeks with hardly so much
as two or three shades of grey in him,
he couldn't figure out why.
It wasn't the world.  Regardless of what the
news media did to misrepresent it, the world
had for at least a century been a miles-wide river
plunging ever more radiantly fableward,
with only occasional inches of its edges 
scraping anything truly painful or disfiguring.

Nor had his own life recently scraped anything
more injurious than minor allergies, and the normal
diminishments of aging.  

He stared.  

He hit a few keys.

He stared.  

He considered going back to bed,
but what was the point?  Even in the unlikely event
that he fell asleep, it wouldn't be for long,
or do anything for him.

Fortunately, some gland of his finally tripped 
him awake enough to remember the simple solution.
To his icebox, then, wondering foggily
why he hadn't thought of it sooner,
for a glass of . . . Mountain Dew.
Mountain Dew!
Hardly more than ten sips of that later,
he was in a poem worth living in,
quivering with anticipation of
the unmapped improvements
he would be adding to it.