Poems & Prayers

“Dream Team”

The title is ironic. A “dream team” typically describes an outstanding group of compatible individuals who work perfectly together: For example, the gold-medal winning 1992 US men’s Olympic basketball team was famously nicknamed the Dream Team. 

In the poem, the team in question comprises the many facets of a person’s inner life. Although an individual may be made up of many sterling qualities, it is not easy to make all those separate traits work together in a cohesive unit, in which members are not out for themselves but act for the good of the whole. The speaker asks how truth, honesty, frankness, conscience, and desire could get along; the contrast is between the first four seemingly positive qualities, three of which are nearly synonymous descriptions of forthrightness, with desire, a more morally ambiguous facet of personality that encompasses ambition, lust, and greed. 

McConaughey uses metonymy, or alluding to a concept by the name of something associated with that concept, when he refers to one’s conscience as “Jiminy Cricket.” In Walt Disney’s animated version of Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket is an anthropomorphic insect who acts as the conscience for the titular puppet. 

The poem offers no high-minded solution to the quandary that everybody has characteristics that pull in different directions and are hard to integrate into a smoothly functioning personality. The final line shows in a laid-back way the magnitude of the task: “it’d be nice if they all got along for more than a couple of hours” (Line 5).

“Daymares”

The poem appears to be a description of a regular day in McConaughey’s life, but its speaker uses the plural first-person pronouns “us” and “we” throughout. McConaughey does this elsewhere in the collection as well; the effect is to generalize his viewpoint and make it relatable by suggesting that many people experience similar things. 

The poem is a catalog of horrors that haunt the waking imagination. We all have our own private “monsters” (Line 5) that we dare not even look at. We enable and cooperate with the negative qualities that prey on us: “[T]he bad wolves we feed” (Line 9). We suffer from self-inflicted injuries: “[T]he wounds we cut ourselves to bleed” (Line 10). We pay attention to lies rather than the truth and produce “false claims” (Line 16) ourselves in turn. We commit crimes and misdeeds but then excuse ourselves for them. The most damning thing is that evil lurks within us but we refuse to recognize it.

The daymare is, well, a nightmare; it is an endlessly negative and bleak picture of the self’s manifold failings. The poem stresses that these flaws are often internally derived: We create trouble and unhappiness for ourselves without acknowledging our responsibility for doing so. 

“Temptation”

The speaker is in a self-induced stupor of alcohol and marijuana intoxication: “numb drunk, smoked up” (Line 1). As a result, his thoughts turn negative: “unkind with vile mind” (Line 2). He knows that even worse is coming as “the vultures and hyenas” (Line 4) circle around him—metaphors for the way he is destroying himself. 

Yet he believes that he is unable to alter his course until he sees “an albino armadillo irrigating my lawn” (Line 7), a fanciful expression that conveys the same idea as the idiom “when pigs fly.” This humorous hallucinatory image seems to have a positive effect on the troubled speaker. It enables him to realize that “it is time to tend my garden” (Line 8), or to take care of himself and make better choices about his life. Rather than ceding decision-making to the inebriation, he must sober up “to check in and choose” (Line 10). 

“The Mess I Made”

This poem centers on the Christian idea of sin or unrighteous living. The speaker believes his sins to be great. He conveys this via the metaphor of a cup filled to overflowing. The image of a cup full of evil contents is a biblical reference: In the Garden of Gethsemane, before his arrest, Jesus begs God to “[l]et this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:39)—a metaphor for the coming trial and crucifixion that he knows he is fated to undergo.

In the poem, the speaker’s sins spill from the cup and make a mess in his house. The metaphor continues: The malevolent fluid is rotting the wood and attracting flies and mosquitoes; there is standing water; and the kitchen is flooded. The speaker feels hopeless and believes he will drown in his sins, yet he is helpless to alter his behavior: “Oops, yep, I did it again, / spilled my drink / of disease and sin” (Lines 57-59). 

“Fallen Leaves”

In this poem about sin, the setting sun casts a shadow that becomes a metaphor: The speaker can use this unlit area to hide as commits his sins. Here, his bad behavior is the result not of temptation or intoxication, but of boredom: Having no responsibilities means “up to no good’s next” (Line 5). 

The shadow imagery returns, but this time as a source of fear: Confused, the speaker compares himself in a simile to a “black dog” (Line 17) that is running from its own shadow. Then, continuing the dog comparison, he metaphorically shakes a tree so he can bark at the fallen leaves. 

This poem expresses unrelieved distress, self-loathing, and contempt. There does not seem to be a ray of hope anywhere as the shadows gather. 

“What’re You Gonna Do?”

The title is the rhetorical question that accompanies the speaker’s experience of getting older. Implying a shrug of the shoulders and a sour, frowny facial expression, it conveys frustration, bewilderment, and resignation. There is obviously nothing that can be done to halt the passing years. A person can of course adjust their attitudes and expectations, but that is not the focus of the poem, which expresses dismay at how things are changing now the speaker has reached the age of 50. 

The poem uses anaphora, or the repetition of a word of phrase at the beginning of a line, to emphasize the speaker’s temporal stuck-ness. 18 of the poem’s 25 lines begin with the word “when,” highlighting the long litany of undesired changes that aging inflicts on people. However, some of the transformations seem particularly relevant to an actor known for his good looks and masculine physique. Among the changes he notes are, “When your showin’ off quits causin’ a swoon” (Line 9), the new experience of physical pain, “when the hands that once soothed are now the ones that hurt” (Line 18), and finding that “your million-dollar smile’s turned into a smirk” (Line 20).

In a note below the poem, McConaughey states that he wrote it when he turned 50 because “[s]omething about that number made me think more about my mortality, my legacy, my relevance, and admit that the blue-eyed blonder days don’t last forever” (141), underscoring the specific pain of physical deterioration to someone whose career and identity are based at least in part on appearance.