Hamlet Days

Inaction piles up, freeway crashes in a death fog.
Voting is a long mangled chain to pull a trigger and kill some kid.

A river of dead bodies, and the neighbors decide
they, too, want to just jump in and float...

live life face down in the diseased water,
breeze on the back their only sense of travel.

Merchants set their hometown ablaze for the money in charcoal.
So much fear that every general gets his own parade.

Hunters and gatherers lock themselves into place. Permanent.
And teach the children food first, then joy, maybe,

until they’re dropped in the box truly marked Forever.
Or so, my friend more or less says. He’s right.

It’s all true. Everything we know is true.
No words exist to argue this.

And, yet, there is a poem.
For no reason at all.

Nothing is the stuff
of our only maybe future.

That’s what I try to say.
Tell me I’m wrong. You're right.