Now that you’ve squeezed the life from all your devices,
having come as close as you’ll ever get
to digital transcendence and satiety,
I suppose you won’t mind returning to yourself,
even if only for a few minutes,
to look at the mess that’s been accumulating
around you: the days upon days of unmade beds;
the litter box rejected by the cat,
who’s taken now to posting his defecations,
in strategic defiance of human neglect
and with high feline ingenuity,
where you may not find them before they petrify;
the signs of an imminent plumbing disaster
visible on two floors and in three rooms;
the stack of unopened red flags from collection
agencies, some likely bearing on your mortgage;
a string of voice-mail notifications
informing you that at least two friends have passed on
or scolding you for familial negligence…
The list goes on and could go on and on.
But all of that’s just what’s happened on the home front.
Your absence has contributed to entropy
on local, state, national, and even
international and universal levels,
fulfilling laws of physics and Buddhist sages
who knew how each small thing affects the whole.
The folly to be feared or praised has septupled
in a proliferation of idiocy
that to all appearances knows nor bound
nor limit. It’s a time of opportunity
to try all manner of things right and of things wrong –
a time to watch the world disintegrate,
but also a time to derive moral lessons
for application after the apocalypse
(or, more likely, its lackluster lesser –
the one that John of Patmos was referring to
through the medium of that narrative genre
in vogue among disillusioned subjects
of the Roman empire, who took to revealing
(or “unveiling”) the various sorts of evil
discernible in the world around them
by envisioning metaphysical justice
meted out in symbols and in lurid events
to evildoers from the walks of life
that led unangelic echelons into flesh).
For while you were off in virtual interface
with other virtual alter-others,
a man – an orange man – has come into command…
or is it we who’ve commanded that he come in?
Of course, you’re likely already aware.
You circulated memes and engaged in debate,
in raillery and other forms of bemusement,
in skirmishes with those who disagreed
or who somewhat agreed for politeness’s sake.
But you never emerged to check if it was real.
Alas, it’s real. Of course it’s real. It’s real!
Soon enough, we’ll be looking back at these past years
as on the halcyon Weimar of Brecht and Weill
before the world changed unforgivably.
That, at least, is one of the possibilities,
though maybe we’re just on a slope that’s slippery.
The world will not end or the climate change
at a faster rate than it’s already changing.
Gay men will not be forced back into their closets
or lesbian marriages to annul.
Neoliberalism won’t get any worse.
The poor won’t be depleted unto starvation.
That bruited wall will never be built.
Overseas fuckups will be minor and piecemeal.
Fundamentalists will not gain the arsenal
or force us into an Atwood novel.
Black America will retain its vibrancy
despite moving one step forward then two steps back,
confident that that Big Step will ensure,
in the final analysis, forward movement,
however much we may forfeit in the short-term.
And public schools will not be so besieged
by those who wish to Walmartize education
that teaching jobs have been outsourced altogether
to pay-for-play “achievement gap workers,”
with Gabe Kotter and his affectionate Sweathogs
now the relics of a bygone America…
But we’re talking best-case scenarios,
though I won’t tax your presence of mind with the worst.
Anyway, what would be the point of that, my friend?
Some are inferable from the above.
Welcome back to terra firma! Yes, welcome back!