Metalepsis, Genette style,
Is what you should dread rather
Than any Apocalypse.
Beginning with intrusions
Disrupting the narrative,
By the time you’ve gone looking,
You’ll find all tales infected,
All the myths by which you live,
Disintegrating causes.
There’s no closure to the world,
Only the endless breaking
Of frames by intruding frames,
One ocean of mirroring
Glass windows for waves, the last
Shattering as the next breaks.
Now sit by a sunny window and think
About anything that’s irrelevant
To solving the problems of the known world,
To accomplishing something important,
To bringing yourself closer to your god.
Good. Don’t tell anyone what you’re thinking.
Don’t even whisper it into this poem.
How is anyone to live with dying
Other than by refusing to grant life
The satisfaction of being your goal?
Your only strategy now,
Given what decades taught you
Of all that’s gone before you,
Is to remain small and not
Move much and hope to survive
Some days, months, few years longer.
Life is a child who won’t go
To bed quietly, whining
For just a little minute
Longer and then another
Minute after that, although
Even life will, at some point,
Give in without knowing it,
And slump down, out like a light.
This is why morality
Won’t work. Listen to the words
Of the most ruthless people,
Hear how often they invoke
Friendship, fairness, just causes,
How they mourn their own losses,
Speak with pride of lofty goals.
Moral language is a tool
Anyone and everyone
Can and will use, and no tool
Humans ever invented
Hasn’t been made a weapon.
The weather around you
Will matter more to you
Than the weather elsewhere.
A storm in the body
Tends to dim your concern
For wars around the world.
When things are getting worse
Within, outer nature
Becomes less important.
But not nothing. In lulls
In the storms, you’ll notice
The world is still the world.
There’s fine light on the ice
Outside your battered walls.
