5
Anxiety Disorder
stress wears her shark and wasp dress
to the dance and of course i
get stuck to her hip even though
she’s chemical and illusion,
peace killer and nerve strangler,
maenad of cardiocide.
but we rumba close and fast
to the edge of the stairs, dip into peril
that has to run,
foxtrot and lindy hop,
disrupting waltzes
and wrecking pavanes.
nothing cute in my twists or her spider jive,
just a seizure
doing its best to be covert.
no one can see her either,
just that dandy disintegrating me.
breath-starved clown bumbling on a precipice,
hag- and sweat- and hurt-ridden.
a solo zugzwang
with my organs for chesspieces.
either the white or the black silk
of the social burial shroud has checkmated me.
it doesn’t matter.
on the scale of things, civilization is about to end soon, or at least my life. on the other hand, i have it better than the majority of creatures, especially the trillions of amoebas and those tarantulas who get paralyzed by wasps and injected with eggs. most of the time people act like stupid beasts, including me. when i write a good poem, finally, after murdering many drafts, it’s the only way i’m allowed to scream and it’s still, well, just a blip in the echo chambers of the collective non-conscience. even the Big Bang doesn’t reach many ears. that is why we are in trouble. humanity started by killing lots of wild animals, then we killed the wild, now we are replacing flesh, beginning the process of grafting chips into our brains. we are the Bridge Species on this particular planet. the future is software biology and hardwired meat. nothing like this has happened over five billion years. welcome the cyborg era. does anyone care? we all say yes, we all act no. in other words, we are just as much pawns as those archaeo-algae that turned the atmosphere from methane to oxygen, destroying themselves by teeming.
