It’s OK.
You don’t have to survive all of it.
You have to fight, yes,
you must resist, yes. But survival is for
those who believe in a future
with them in it. Get free of that

and let your self-importance go;
do what you can and must. 

Don’t worry
about the ultimate triumph of your own
ideology when poison needs to be
ameliorated and 
removed from the suddenly broken veins
of the dying. Don’t worry if in the effort
you suck more death than you can handle.
Spit out what you can and keep moving
as long as possible. 

You’re expendable, always were, old man.
You were part of the problem long enough
to be suspect.  If you go, you go.
After all it’s not going to be
your world afterward. Move on with a smile.

You’re ancillary at best, a well-meaning nuisance
at worst.  Get out of the way of what must follow
once you’ve done your bit. Individual

survival is unimportant. You are 
not worthy of exception.  Move on.
This is the moment of truth. Live 
in it, not in the one that follows.

Late last night I heard someone calling out in the street. 
Heard someone come down the stairs from the second floor.
Heard the door open, someone came inside,
and more people went upstairs than had come down.
There was talking and loud stomping for an hour,
then someone left quietly and I went to sleep

imagining backstory, drifting in and out of anger,
picturing someone hungry, someone thirsty,
someone done in by cold and impending snow,
someone done in by a longing to end a longing
by buying or selling themselves or their drug.
I kept myself awake far longer than I needed to
wondering and raging and reproaching myself 
for wondering and raging. It was no business
of mine beyond the nuisance of being roused
from two AM to three AM.  All the fear
and righteous thought I soaked in
for an hour after that

was a stale old problem I borrowed
from the bank of pain I keep
and owe and curse,
where I cannot seem
to close my account.

To remain asleep in this storm,
waiting it out while the snow piles up,
is a white comfort in a whitening landscape.
You can lie there and think about

what you are going to do
when what’s outside
no longer matches up
to what you think you’ve been seeing.
When you find it’s all been a cover up,
will you die or explode? Or will you
step out and see the green and gold light
on the brown earth? When spring comes
will you allow yourself to be happy?

You think about that now while you’re seeing
the whiteness covering everything.
You think about that and stop pretending
it’s never going to go away.

I sit up in bed and stare at the ceiling
as if it is going to sink down upon me
like a car compactor at any moment
and push me into two dimensions from three,

and at the side walls as if they would slide over
to meet each other and take me
from two dimensions into one,

and then toward the foot of the bed
to see if that wall will come up
and crush my newly linear self into a single point. 

A vanishing point, maybe. 
A pixel on a screen, perhaps. 

I have faith that none of this
will hurt, no blood will flow from me,
my bones will simply telescope shut
and compress into memory.

A single point seems indestructible enough.
A single point can slide through any catastrophe.
Infinite lines can pass through a single point
and it will remain indelibly itself.
I can do that.  I can be myself,
reduced to holding infinity stretching
in all directions. 

It seems far better to do that,
to enable that which remains,
to be a mere point
allowing others to intersect
and extend themselves,
than to wring these temporary hands
over the loss of my identity
to the weight of looming darkness.

The mercy of a calm cold morning
keeps me snug in my home,
safe from chaos.

I get to pretend I can’t hear
the roaring outside over the sound
of my comfortable furnace.

There’s not even a storm
to fret over. The sun’s bright,
the wind chill is rough

but I’ve seen and felt worse.
I can deal with that. 
It’s not the wind making the noise

that I’m hiding from. The roar I fear
is human, full of words
I can’t or won’t understand

that drilled through my sleep
and opened me
as screwworms might

but without leaving a visible trace.
The mercy of the cold morning
is that it keeps me

from stepping to the sound
and joining in. I can choose
to stay here and pretend

I hear nothing, can pretend
I won’t soon need
to become harmful as well.

From where I stand mercy
is a cold illusion I can indulge
as long as I stay inside,

so here I will stay 
for as long as I can, knowing
it cannot last and I am needed out there.

a spider
in a corner
cocooning
a beetle holding 
remains of joy
in its jaws.

mice nibbling
final hopes
spilled across
a dusty 
kitchen floor.

masses of wind
fling themselves against
windows that are
slowly but surely
giving in
to the battering.

on and on,
house by house,
block by block, 
city after town
after farm after town 
after city. 

almost all of The People
have disappeared.
anyone left
expecting to hear
other voices
hears nothing
but the sounds of

earth scavenging
what’s left and 
taking down the ruins.

I’m so tired 
of all this outrage, tongues

clacking surprise,
horror, post-verbal wringing

of digital hands
in cyberspace. I mean, it’s been

a colony for a minute now.
People keep forgetting — 

one privilege of being
a colonizer, I guess, no matter

how many generations you are
removed from the first,

is that you are alllowed
to forget

how the good old gears
turn and grind and

who and how many get ground
changes, but the colony itself

always remembers 
that it was built to grind. 

I am trying to be like
everyone else around me 

and be shocked and surprised
and wring my hands

and say the right things
but I can’t.

I can’t. I feel alone
here because none of this

seems new to me except
this general bewilderment 

that it’s happening, as if
all the shrill wailing of history was in fact

a silent alarm and only some
heard it, while others have had it

in their ears from birth; now it seems
everyone can hear it, 

but most are paralyzed,
and those still in motion

are scattered and separate,
grains fallen unground from the mill.

After centuries
of listening to that,

the wailing is
an insult

almost as loud to me
as the grinding.