Put it to paper: Another simplicity.
like going to bed, or sitting
at table, consuming a meal (catch as catch can);
even the taking of pills, vitamins at breakfast, astringents, enemas, massages,
therapies like radio-electric whatchamacallits to keep you ever so much younger.
All comparisons too subtle for discernment: man in the Holocene,
man in the paleolithic. Requisite changes required
to modulate a tune, draw a bison,
the reconfiguration of genes, a confliction of alleles.
Unlike ice, a species does not melt when removed from the refrigerator.
It is genes that reconfigure, not our especial our particular needs that are confronted.
Basic unconcern for the individual.
One is confounded daily by nuances of reality.
We fight, all our lives, we fight,
and when, in the morning, we waken, we are already angry:
didn’t get that job
we were eminently qualified;
in each pair of socks at least one is holed;
whose responsibility is it to do that repair?
You, who can’t thread a needle.
Once more then: quotidian announcements:
Cave-man still rampant, observed (by our reporter) stringing bows,
stalking dog-walking women on Main Street
utilizing techniques that were common to Neanderthal;
Street corner ladies strutting the Champs Ellisse, exhibiting their allurements,
unperturbed by HIV or social stigma or the necessity for frequent abortifacients.
Trees compete quietly, dropped leaves discourage undergrowth.
Even their own seeds are damned in the brown-out.
And today’s page one, pot-filled and brim-to-the-top with Evolution.
How can one doubt the inevitable?
Sunni. Shia: our daily disintegration.
New York street gangs relegated
to small print in second section.
Politicos glower in sunlight, like walruses in heat,
shower us with fairy tale promises that tomorrow is tomorrow.
In the meanwhile, Goddess Gaea, our Prime-Time Manipulatrice,
is readying her revenge
And what she’s saying she’s saying,
we make babies indiscriminately, raise them to become soldiers, murderers, prostitutes, wall street traders.
As of this morning, there were seven billion, eight hundred and sixty two million people
milling around, 73 percent of whom actually imagine
that their lives, to this universe, are of real significance.
Water is rising, ominously I think, in the oceans and the Everglades,
and carbon dioxide from our smokestacks is destabilizing the atmosphere.
Mere reiteration of the obvious does not make it less meaningful.
So what can I put on paper that has not already been amplified?
Dinah is blowing her horn no one will listen.
Respiratory paralysis.