Coping

A Poem

How are you finding it, living through the inertia of these surreal end times?
Do you feel the crushing paralysis of its momentous charge into oblivion
As you sort recycling, cans in a box, glass in a box, cardboard in a box?
Behind monotony of household chores, do you notice a prophetic howl inside you
As you consign another shopping bag to the damp Tartarus beneath your kitchen sink?

How are you dealing with it, the encroaching intensification of civilisation’s doom?
Are you returning to a wilderness some part of you remembers, not acquiescing
To the gravity of time, but dancing wantonly instead upon the precipice of reason?
Are you taunting Sisyphus and daring him to slip away with you into the evening
Whispering joyous hedonisms to entice him to shrug off his timeless burden?

How do you navigate it, the cold entropic swirl of endless media?
Do you cower in perplexity at the scale and viscous blackness of its labyrinth
As you feel drawn, moth-like to bleak illuminations of rectangular devices?
Or with bold abandon do you proclaim what’s true with ones and zeros
Become the beacon of your sense, one node of clarity upon a long corrupted network?

How do you bear it, the grim compulsive graceless hum of “progress”?
Are you calling reinforcements to your table, strengthening backbones, battening hatches
In preparation for the harsh eventualities and forlorn consequences of it?
Or are you sitting with your knowing of the need for such resilience, all alone
And wondering melancholically how on Earth one might begin to go about it?

Can you hear it, the oh so quiet absence of depopulated insects?
The silence in the oceans, ghostly corals left to stand their own bleak vigil?
Can you stand the icy grip of Kronos long enough to see what’s really there without projection?
Or will you try to live the transformation of your age with every breath until you die
And Saturn has you then regardless of the beauty and good sense of your intention.

How do you carry on despite it, this dreadful knowledge of the present?
Do you ask the Lord for wisdom so that you might know what things are yours to change
Hoping ripples might become tsunamis soaking sinful beaches in your humble piety?
Or do you seek escape to other planes of consciousness or planets or perhaps a merger
With a simply loving archetype or algorithmic being of our creation?

Have you gotten out your whiteboard, hoping to reduce our suffering down into a diagram?
Are you sketching figures half remembered from your psychedelic death experience preview?
Are you working day and night to try and stave off death for longer or forever?
Have you come up with a formula by which economies could find a new delusion for their grandeur?
Are you on your knees in mud searching for ancestors to help you give life meaning?
Do you take it on yourself to make yourself into a giant that you might hold up the heavens?
Are you bending over backwards trying to lend a hand to others?
Are you taking to the streets to yell your righteous anger outwards? Or
Are you just sat there waiting for a shred of hope to presented on some podcast?

Or are you oscillating wildly in between, from day to next bamboozled day
Exhausted and still glad to be alive but wondering what is yours to do and
Never really reaching reasonable conclusions?

Wanting sometimes to give up on making sense and meaning of these times
(it would, perhaps, be nice, to be a nihilist)

But never really being able?