J. Randall Hobbs stirred his Cheerios in doubt.
It was a coughed-up kind of morning,
the kind you wouldn't buy unless it was bundled
with a bunch of things, like a day at the lake
or a sick day from work when you're not that sick.
A round corral of tiny brown inner tubes.
"This can't be food," he thought most mornings.
"But, really, what else is there? This can't be life,
you could say. This can't be our leaders. This can't
be our entertainment. This can't be our religion. Etc."
An etc. kind of morning. They're coming more often.
A morning that took place yesterday, too. Next?
One more day in the help department, answering
install questions from the stupid and the lazy.
No wonder. The apocalypse just seems natural.
He couldn't escape it. He'd count the extinctions.
"I think all humans agree," thought J. Randall.
"Bartenders everywhere would be friends. Poets
should all call each other. All junior high teachers
should share their horror stories. Nurses are nurses,
no matter the country, religion, language, gender.
How is it we'll cook this planet until we're gone?"
His boss was a Christian and regularly announced
our one God had a plan for us. No such thing
as a species piloting the planet to doomsday.
J. Randall couldn't argue. He had to shut up.
Didn't he? His family needed him at this job,
in one of the loneliest stretches of Iowa. He asked
Loretta that morning, "What should I do?"
"Tell him to go to hell," she said. Worried like him
about her kids' kids, and their lives then. 4+ degrees.
Less water. More people. Wars gone nuclear.
But, now, the battleground is among grey cubicles
in an auto parts distributorship in nowheresville?
First, we fight what's said? One by one by one?
Language is little more than breath. Cheap. Easy.
Impossible. J. Randall and Loretta hugged hard,
and both remembered themselves new again.
Maybe the problem these mornings is words,
as if they come first, as if they bring daybreak.
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