The Throes of Our Slow Decay
A Poem
It’s hard to admit even when it’s staring at you directly in the face, day after long day, that we are, in fact, in the throes of our slow decay
Once strong, we are weak Once confident, we are meek Once powerful, we are a shadow We are crumbling beneath ourselves standing at the edge of a cliff and thinking the fall is preferable
Decay is an odd thing because you don’t notice it until it’s too late One day it is pristine and then one day you open your eyes and all you see is a corpse of a world
Zombie films and television shows don’t do this time justice because they missed the mark The people aren’t the ones who become the zombies It’s the world that becomes lost
Some would argue we’ve always been in decay A cavity in and to ourselves but it’s hard not to remember the times when we were so clean and so fresh, full of unbridled hope and wonder when now the mirror shows our decomposition
It’s hard to admit but part of me likes watching it because there are so many who caused it and some days I just feel like it's their time For those bigots and racists and sexists to feel the weight of the world decaying on top of them and their outdated views of what matters
The throes of our slow decay is a deterioration of community and a lack of universal awareness mired in a bog full of misplaced spittle but I hope it’s not us who are decaying but the winds of change doing their thing
This poem was inspired by a passage in the novel, Zone One by Colson Whitehead. I find myself highlighting words or passages that move me every time I read, no matter what I am reading. When I find the highlight that projects to a poem, I don’t read the source again before I write, I just allow the nerve to be touched. And then I spill my words.
A snippet from pages 108-109 of Zone One, where I got my inspiration:
He hated banana. He drank it anyway, blowing into the striped straw to dislodge a plug of pulp, and stepped out to the sidewalk into the rush-hour stream of the dead on their way home, the paralegals, mohels, resigned temps, bike messengers, and slump-shouldered massage therapists, the panoply of citizens in the throes of their slow decay.
© Jonathan Greene 2020
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