The Brooklyn Rail

Present Condition

Spending my days scheduling future dates
When they arrive I’m already elsewhere
Building a future without faith in one
Anxiety about anxiety

Days become syllabi menu options
Study becomes monetized credentials
Work becomes metric rubric units
Worry about worry’s distracted stare

Finding gratitude finding gratitude
Daily effort recalling enjoyment
Today held moments of ease unaware
Gratifying easy breathing dumb alive
Involuntary unknowing pauses

Now achieved as writing exercises
Now appreciated through willed effort
Now understood as no accomplishment
Now being unknown as comprehension
Now thinking about thinking about letting go

Self-duplicity as diastole
Clutching a standstill moment’s systole
Eyes half shut to parquet flooring glimmer
Spine stiff stomach taut folded leg knee crack
Abide duration abide duration

The end finds me as a preset alarm
Listen without naming ambient sound
Time passes indifferent to the sense of it
Indifference no longer responsive
Erasure of erasure present tense

Zinnias dahlias lilies hydrangeas
Regardless air toxicity levels
Regardless record breaking heat measures
Plant intelligence defiant adapts
Newly emergent invasive species

New virus variants among species
Siren constancy passing ambulance
Alarm filling oxygen atmosphere
Shallow breath particulate pollution
Sleeping in front of box fan set high

Gone Missing

Welcome all carried away restless lumps
There’s a peace movement here summoning us
Can you feel it? Alliances among
Abject scarred scared bloody battered bludgeoned
Fate drives chariots against family
Frozen battlefield CGI effect
Still warriors ask, ”What are we doing here?”
Stunned fast-forward inexorable
We here need medications solace
Bonding salve healing microscopic tears
Surface protein cellular blockade
Powerful biologic warfare plasma
Red theory green experiential study
Ladders away plateaued geometries
No more triangulations proxy wars
Archival “ain’t gonna study war no more” footage
Our ancestors; our dead among
Metal into gold; our transmutations
Hurl chunks onto arms manufacture
Give up abused organ pieces
This piece is a violent secreting
This piece assembles no thing