Blue Ruin
--“I could forgive you if you were crazy. But you’re not. You’re weak.”
In normal times, we might
examine our condition
and do better by some
standards, recalibrate
our global systems, raise
rusty pitchforks against
all the gouged prices. We
would surely individuate
children, rafts of souls
limned in ice-cold patterns,
empty outlines on the seas.
Reclaim our hands—unify!
Craft sky-blue plans for incar-
nation, not incorporation. Pause
in the rubble for flits of spirit-
breezes, and more, if things
were normal. But now they are.
It seems that we are normally
both crazy and weak. Some more
than others, no doubt, but what
can we say to beg forgiveness? I
didn’t mean it? I lost my head?
Not my fault? History in a fog
now, smoky glass as memory,
that napalmed girl, Kim Phuc,
or that kid who sniped another
suspected of a bomb, and all
those trudging bearded men
behind their grocery carts
flying flags and begging
as if they were guilty, some
few with personal trainers
coming to their lofts to keep
them svelte and coiffed as
if to meet today the greatest
of them all, all alike. It is a ruin
we have made. Imagination
might have prepped us for crazy,
if not for evil; it might have
stretched our thews enough
to strengthen, as that trainer
might have said. We might
have bent our backs toward joy,
not dark regrets, oblivion.
We might have imagined
down a long, dim runway
flights gone inward, silver
worms to unruin ourselves.