Image created by Midjourney, a young woman’s downcast face surrounded by a symmetrical halo of jagged black shadows (tar?)
You have to have had a bad trip at least once
to endure life in this godforsaken millennium
where time moves at two speeds
the very fast
and the very long;
where the periphery
has become the ground;
where images of murdered children [the sound of their screams removed]
kaleidoscope
fractally
viscerally
unrelentingly
taking the shape of genocide
then refugees drowning at the lips of angry borders
now the poisoned rain of our slow shared climate death.
Because you always come into a trip with such grandiose expectations:
your friend has a shroom connection
someone knows a cool spot
and no one has anywhere to be the next day,
and then you find yourself huddled in the bathroom,
sweating and crying,
as you watch the Day-Glo bubbles of the city’s breath rise to the surface of the toilet water and
disappear without bursting.
Because you know we came into this millennium with that big Times Square energy
that shared Y2K hysteria,
our first chance to rehearse for a tragedy with potentially global consequences
without actually preparing for it.
And then one year in
four planes were hijacked
by pilots who trained on US soil
but left class before learning
how to land.
And for years all anyone could see
was two tall buildings with flames leaping delicately only from the top floors.
and not the way they both
astonishingly
disappeared
leaving pipe-shaped billows of smoke,
that smelled of something terrible
burning,
and cast a decades’ long shadow.
This is almost the literal underbelly of our expectations.
So now, when you counsel the young girl huddled over the toilet to
Breathe,
or,
vomit if you have to,
or shit
there’s no point in fighting it
you know of which you speak.
Still trembling against the poison she feels in her bowels and blood
she struggles to slow and deepen her breaths.
Here’s where you start whispering
Shh, my dear one, shh.
There is no respite
and no reprieve
and no lost eden to which you can credibly long to return
not post-war plentitude
not the Christian Middle Ages
not pre-Christian nature.
It has never been entirely safe for us,
for women
and there is no figure you can turn to
or return to
for safety
or wholeness
But, I’m here.
Your solid hand
traces warm circles
on her back.
It’s automatic
the tracing
and the whispering
like a mother who continues to rock back and forth lulling the child in her arms
long after he has fallen asleep
long after he is too old to be held in her arms and rocked to sleep.
You know this is the least amount of comfort you can offer
and the most.
You know how easily
even you
can turn into a swampy black figure hunched hungry
in her past.
You know that this thin stretch of intimacy
—you know that it’s thin.
There is still solid ground,
you coo,
but you don’t have to reach for it yet.
Not here where the breaches are sometimes spectacular plastic vortexes in the ocean,
and sometimes merely arsenic in the Johnson & Johnson’s baby wash.
Not here, where the predators are
our familiars.
You have to have lived
through the blindfold coming off
and staying
horrifically off
for minute-hours
of hijacked attention
microscope eyes
running over histories of exploitation, extraction, and extermination
and all of the manic fads, waves, strivings
for relief
for respite
for control
Bobby Socks &
Taebo
the poorly-sublimated grotesqueries of bad faith,
what Césaire called
the West’s “fetid guts.”
How else can you convince this huddled girl
wondering how she can possibly live through attention heightened to the point of suffocation
that being pinioned
like a fly
in the amber
or tar
of capacious and unendurable seconds
is
oddly
endurable.