Including Time

Born after my funeral

I was excreted by acceptance into the toilet of denial

Depression arrived as the friction between recollection and reality

Rendering in relief the dry loaf between was and am

Which is spotted with the mold of what will be

Diseases do not strike bargains

The Styx has always been a source of sham invulnerability

Wrath leaves your heel naked and afraid

Denial is folly

Especially when you are well enough to know you're ill

Live in the interstices

Narrow alleys that cut through the wreckage of comfortable familiarity

Let the hot hands of the burning clock

Slap you sober and teach you to walk awkwardly

Exquisitely conscious of the looks and whispers

Weariness of the polite, earnest check in

Will grind your bones to make stale bread

Imagine carefully polishing your skills

Just in time to discover that your instrument has melted

Into a pool in which you see your own, crooked reflection

Time's arrow misses the apple and finds your eye

A conveyor belt of smooth, jacked robot corpses

Substitutes for the workshop from which essays used to roll

Nothing is read

Nothing is felt

Nothing is imagined

Nothing is questioned

No opinion ever gestates into belief

Let alone knowledge

Summaries swarm

Blotting out the long, complicated light of neon verse

Condescending triage drowns out collaboration

Feeling evacuates each greeting

Memories and fantasies shrink and mock the present

When your palms recall what the mad bucking of shapely hips feels like

They recoil from the cool, perfunctory handshakes of dire prognoses

You will learn to sing just in time for ears to become extinct

You will learn to write just in time for reading to be murdered

You will see attention dethroned by boredom and distraction

You will learn to teach just in time for learning to go out of fashion

You will become a doctor just in time for expertise to become a magnet

For the sharp, steely chaff of paranoid suspicion and confident ignorance

The villain of the story of the pandemic will be played by the vaccine

Corpulent, deranged monsters will weave laws out of the fabric of lies

Ballroom controversy will drown out the screams of immolated children

Targeted by large language models trained by senile cartographers

Stuttering will steal the clothing of eloquence

Criminals will incarcerate the just and the innocent

Rapists will oppose abortion

Illiterates will misquote scripture

The search for credible information will become a dumpster dive

Wringing organic calories out of synthetic slop will keep you busy

Until fitful, sweaty sleep

Anxious awakening

Farcical, tedious labor

Doors will dash

Carriages, once happy to be rid of horses

Will shrug off drivers and ignore passengers

The fuel will run short before the trip begins

The food will run short before the feast

The wine will run short before the mass is held

We will ignore the attention deficit

Exhausted by futile hyperactivity

Made suspiciously svelte by sinister syringes

Just in time for the famine

We will have to try to remember

The meaning of situational irony

In a world taught to get by without certainty

About the meaning of anything at all

Including time