My despair trivialized

A poem

Every morning I wake up with gun smoke on my lips, despair like reflected light off a dropped atomic bomb caught in that tinnitus, my head a seashell that never shuts up. I’m a car crossing the white line, road bumps turning noise into more noise into an airplane propeller winding up for takeoff, last flight to Indonesia, December 25, 2004, bring a camera.

The glaciers are melting. The ice that thaws will never be that shape again, will never yearn toward canyons and valleys like tooth decay in the mouth of god. Instead, the Netherlands are getting their feet wet. My despair seems trite compared to an entire nation of squishy soles.

Most men die between blinks, trying to remember something, like whose birthday it is, when the universe asks them to unfold like a samurai blade in reverse, back to the raw elements, a seppuku of human will pitted against unrelenting indifference.

Coincidence mocks our attempts at self discovery. Just the act of deciding what shirt to wear can mean life or death, looking left or looking right, the first frost of winter a holocaust for mosquitos and the hope of the homeless. Give them books of poetry about the beauty of life’s struggle, and they will burn them to stay warm. There’s poetry in every camp fire keeping fingers unfrozen.