Transition Porotocol

Everything in the world tells me to wait wait wait.  A biting wind blows us back in from a short, unsatisfying excursion out of doors, the pale dusting of snow infuriates me, but not so much as the fact that I have yet again fallen for the false promise of calendar spring in Minnesota.  I prickle at everything, the surfeit of opinions everywhere, every know-nothing is an expert on economics, politics, environmental science, I judge it all false bravado incantations against a bank of fog rolling over an inexorable night.  On a question and answer forum I sometimes haunt someone actually asks whether the global ecology is finally fucked enough that they can stop caring.  The sign of the times is that the question is actually allowed to stand.  The questioner eventually marks the best response to someone who replied: You can stop caring about the environment when you start shitting in the middle of your living room.  This is about as good an answer as such a question can get and far more clever than I could come up with, but the writing on the wall that everyone would rather pretend not to notice seems to me to be that clever isn’t going to talk our asses out of this one, and we’ve more or less forgotten how to be pleasant.

And this thing, another rootless, ill-defined project existing for no good reason I can see, is a tectonic plate, constantly shifting, how would you even notice or mark a transition, if one occurred?

No Tomorrow

There is no tomorrow for

the one you failed to say goodbye to

here I am struggling to finish

something I said I wouldn’t

even try to

Another poet struck down

more sweet words are lost

Sometimes I wonder if

even God pauses to count the cost

There’s no tomorrow I’ve

been waiting 37 years

and every greater ecstasy

came with its batch of
bitter tears

And if we had a thousand years

we still couldn’t say enough

I hope at some strange angle

I’ll be called upon to call that bluff

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 25, 2009 at 1:10 PM