Advice for Surviving the National Emergency

Be careful whose hand you shake. There are implications. If it’s attached to an organ grinder like mine, or a sock, or someone’s back, you might be complicit. Then again if it leaps off a committee-sponsored keyboard, STEM in its vicious circularity will prevent your escape from the desert and induce desiccation, men [& the rest of us] dying every day [the rest of us dying in brackets] for lack of what we no longer seek—our poetics now pre-wrapped in silk infused with venom—keystrokes tenderizing the animal instinct to sniff out sex and red meat and the rancid breath of predators and the top ten tips for clambering to the top of the food chain. People have a need to think about things, and even dry bones will reject a too-predictable god. Starved exegesis bares its teeth and finds prey, leaving it to analysis to provide the apology. Expression mimics, reprises, becomes a mating if not meeting of what’s used to be minds. Which is to say we’re doomed. As always. Only we used to kind of know it.