To
the human kind
on
our birthday –
a
time to blow out our candles
and
make wishes –
to
say one thing
and
do another. To
reach
for the stars and
settle
for Jersey Shores,
Paulie
Shore would have sufficed;
and
you can believe us, now,
anytime,
about the disappearing ice –
it
may have dissolved in sweating drinks
at
public fundraisers for private interests,
where
all the wait-staff wear microphones
and
communicate via handshake
details
nobody yet knows because
they
haven’t seen Brad Pitt
play
it in a movie, and nobody famous
is
dying, or it wasn’t adopted by the
public
craze for phat-bottomed socialites
suffering
Stockholm Syndrome, fixing to
be
First Lady to President Kanye…
Let’s
all head west until we fall screaming
like
bitches into the sea, while looking back
to
see the fire consume
our
hemp sneakers by the door
to
the sauna, where hot-bored mom fell asleep
with
the under-age pool boy
and
spent the next morning in church, telling
herself
he was almost eighteen –
another
laughing matter for a lunch of clichés
on
the patio by the car-park,
beside
the street where buses continue
to
advertise a better watch, a nicer smile,
a
prettier bride than the one you got,
avenues
of advertisements, each one a better version
than
the one you’re turning out to be;
Don’t
worry, nobody has time to be sentimental,
that’s
the last purpose of Christmas since everybody
knows
that mall Santas are played by unshaven drunks
who
dispensed Tic-Tacs to Kevin McAlister,
and
Christmas cards are only shared because
of
a built up year of ignoring one another,
until
a glass of egg nog and rum allows you
to
say all the things you can’t
normally
yell at children,
even
if their parents continue
to
hide behind iPads and think
supervision
is just casting a few glances.
On
our birthday, by which I mean
we
are still here…
still
fighting, arguing, killing, planning to kill,
confusing
winning with earning,
finding
wisdom in electing the ignorant
rich
to feed the poor,
it’s
like trying to imagine the UN
without
the veto;
who’s
showing who the door?
Shall
we just jump off the tip
of
the iceberg now, and wait
for
the tidal wave to drown the village
and
cut us off and make the government
pay
for all the houses to be carted over the
hills
where the people can meet
their
new neighbours, who are stuck
forever
inside, choosing, every time,
a
scripted Hollywood ending to
the
view from an open window; Netflix did
not
produce this view that you see
from
the place you stand, but they are
selling
it to you in TV families with
one
smart kid and two dumb ones and
a
patriarchal grandfather who’s rich
and
often drinks whisky but nobody seems
care
how often people stare at the chest
of
his much younger wife, and leaves
me
with a suspicion that
you
can only find ugly on reality shows
and
documentaries by actors
who
protest at exclusive parties
attended
by one million channels of television
making
the world think it should run on Nike
and
drive cars that sell clean sheets to the homeless
while
they autonomously swerve around the
Syrian
refugee trying to sell his story
for
a month of rent while he swings and hammers
and
points out all the things that are the same
back
home, except now he’d developed a fear of
small
boats and government-issued life jackets
they
only supply when the aim is to temporary
suspend
your liberty and call it “detention”
because
you crossed a line nobody can see
somewhere
in the middle of the water,
which
can’t tell the difference which legs you
swim
with, in fact, come and learn in our
national
fitness program where everybody
who
isn’t affected by killing will be assembled
to
bring peace to a world preferring to go
to
pieces because some other white-racist will
sit
with parishioners and then kill them,
across
the street from a cop killing a driver
over
a tail light which turns out not to be the
only
light lost in that night,
as
two more eyes close upon the conclusion
that
their wish won’t come true.
