Remain Humane

Never mind the center holding

Who can discern a center in this malevolent maelstrom of madness?

Avarice is our guiding angel

Automata amble unsteadily in to purloin our professions

An original essay is as rare and precious as a Fabergé egg

Everything is summarized and condensed and squeezed into one hundred characters, most of them glowing grimaces and obscene aubergines

Our capacity to read for tone has been eaten raw by emojis

Innocents are cut down like autumn wheat

Abnormalities are tediously conventional and vanilla

Catastrophes collect in the dirty drain of our attention

Vaccinations are optional and insipid euphemisms are mandatory

The perverse polysemy of the mask has exhausted all of its guises

Thoughtless thugs hide behind them even as their protective potential is the target of parody and prejudice

People who played presidents become presidents in fact

Actual experts and spoon bending geniuses are dismissed as frauds and fools

Ignorance is sexy

Knowledge dissolves in the acid of bias, opinion, myth and conjecture

Wisdom is a quaint anachronism, a myth like integrity or truth

But you remain

Billions of minds bubble into being and burst into nothingness

But yours is constituted in a unique and improbable manner

Strange and beautiful as a yeti crab

As irreplaceably idiosyncratic as your ancestors' ideas of who you might be

The world is importuning your imagination to inscribe its likeness onto something

Silence needs you to speak for it

Everything about what you might say or write or sing or sketch matters

For only you can think and feel and dream and hope and weep and laugh

As you can, with your damp eyes and fumbling fingers and haphazard teeth

Whether it is French or Farsi, Swahili or Spanish, Turkish or Tagalog

The semiotic system is the ground; the figure you make is yours alone

All of the other humans conspire to elide the elegant, enchanting enigma you are

Do not allow it

Make the most private, peculiar part of being yourself publicly pellucid

No one else that has ever been, or is, or could possibly be

Is you

Make everyone aware of what they will miss

When the pale avalanche of silence covers you

Give them cause to mourn your passing

Move them to turn to one another in cafes or cubicles or cul-de-sacs

And ask, sotto voce, between a sigh and a scream

"What would he or she or they have made of this?"

Come up with the line that will be woven into eulogies and prayers

Passed through the peculiar prism of your lost heart

What would the light of tomorrow have looked like?

You are still capable of writing

Wrestle something sensational from the tentacles of time

I desperately need to read something only you can write

Get on with it

We are both exhausted and cynical and hopeless

Banquets for maggots we will both promptly become

Stay human, and humane, with me

Fill in the bloody blank

Begin