It's all doom and gloom until I see a sky choked with clouds, colors, and airplanes
So, what now? I'm the MC in a Greek tragedy?
Via: X
I am not tormented by the siren song of nostalgia. I am happy where I am. The present is fine. Some days are even beautiful. The future is a golden halo, where hope is endurable even when it isn’t. Then I look around, and I think: what will kill us? An anticlimactic climate apocalypse? A burgeoning nuclear war? The bludgeoning by communal unrest? How is the end shaping up? How deep is the period that smears our sentence?
All those bodies dying of “natural causes” — what is unnatural about death anyway? Somedays, self annihilation feels like the most natural, ordinary thing in the world. All those bodies carrying all of them, everyday everywhere. How inescapable! How horrific! Everyday, day by day, till their bodies submit, and eyes closed, eternal sleep, and all cheer even as they mourn: at least he went peacefully. Where did he go? What is peaceful about any and all of this?
I am 25, but the wait is longer. I am tired of pulling my weight. I try my best to be good. Use the air conditioner less. Conditioner less. Condition myself to rely less and less on the earth’s space. I try to turn off the tap before five more drops escape. I drink all the drops that kiss the cup instead. I shove my pockets with plastic, collect waste while keeping my own waist slim. I try not to take up space. The Earth is choked. I don’t want to be an uncoughable bone.
Then I read the news. Earth Day is now a joke. Somewhere a bomb falls. When was the last time we saw a star fall and whispered a wish?
When I start to think, I can’t stop. Religion is a killing machine. No guitar can resist it. The Government kills. All machines and men are now government owned.
How can anyone be? Isn’t it easier to fall off the face of the earth, lost in the maze of satellites, body indistinguishable? Everything is sharp. Someday, we’ll all rain down as shrapnel.
All the bodies dead from old, how do you live through the new, and the news?
Now, I read a poem. I am drunk on beauty… till my tongue scrapes against the roof of my mouth, and it’s all desert. We have been deserted by hope. It’s all so unendurable.
Birds pluck out spring repeatedly from their throats. A singular butterfly wing leaves a glittering plume on my cheek. Nature is asking me to blush. I am. I am ashamed of being a person. This person. My person.
Filling my lungs with oxygen, words float in the air, gleaming in the air, like dust suspended in sunlight, like this planet in the Star’s beam. All suspended…hanging…the seconds decadently crawling…when will the alarm startle us awake?
If someone young questions me about aging, I dictate a delicate lie: it gets better.
It doesn’t really.
It’s hard and it’s easy. I know too much. I know nothing. I miss innocence. I loathe ignorance. The world is heavy. I am Atlas. This was supposed to be a myth. Now the stories are all real. A tragedy: we are all fucked. The fatal flaw is being.
All in the lungs, waiting to lunge at the world, echoing long after we are gone. Remember remember, we were here once. And we fucked up, and so will you. Write a poem, or two. Everything is neat in hindsight.
Suspended in a moment in time, where the light we see is the light already passed, tell me: are we still here?
But first — a cup of tea. Green leaves with crushed ginger. No milk.
Now, misted glasses.