Despair
Keep a positive outlook, he says, peering into my eyes. I have no idea what he sees in there. I have no idea what’s an idea other than a handful of words and a drizzle of emotions dropped into a cosmic, industrial-grade blender working around the clock to produce a nonpartisan brew in which emotions beget words and words bash them over the head — pouncing, trouncing, and announcing: “We were here first” — in the beginning there was the word and then we had a major backlash
Keep a positive outlook, he says, everything is gonna be all right. Gimme your rose-colored glasses, I say, extending an open palm. He hands me a pair of dusty work goggles instead, as I try to avoid the political question of “do I or don’t I go to work hammering with jack,” making a racket breaking the asphalt kicking up radioactive dust over the thick goggles that blur out everything, preventing the tear gas from tearing me up, torrentially speaking. Nothing to do but crawl out sopping wet from under the machinery and jump into the rainstorm inside my eyes, not seeing a damn thing save for the broken words, that alphabet soup. I can’t solve this riddle with incomplete alphabet. Give me the rest of the letters if you’d like me to tell the difference between your riddle and my despair
He’d rather smack me around — he who ain’t jack hammer — he’d smack me around in lieu of repeating keep a positive outlook ad infinitum, shaking his head at the blighted terrain lodged in my retina, looking past my optic nerve at the fog and the smoke grenades and the end of time, believing the sun will be back in the morning to illuminate the words. What’s “positive thinking,” coming from someone with frosted-glass eyes and a mishmash of binary options — high places or jail cells, glamor or gloaming, fixed or flowing, toxic ash or lovely green and blue, moreover or whatever. None of my wild guesses work with this riddle. I’m about to be dragged outta here for hitting the wrong key too many times
Keep a positive outlook, he says from his perch — he’s got a perch and I’ve got a gutter. He’s above and I’m below in a political campaign funded by gravity and propped up by the past tense. I’m all tensed up, all bloody fingers and broken nails scraping a dripping dungeon wall, like yeah, “good luck with that.” He’s giving me a benign smirk, forgiving my infractions my total lack of civility. After all, I’ve got options, freedom of choice. Gotta behave. Gotta quit screaming and sobbing and wailing, thrashing around on the cold floor, trashing the life I’ve been allotted when my father did my mother with no protection
Keep a positive outlook, he says, by now an unrelenting mantra not unlike the sound of the jackhammer under my window wielded by a slight wiry man from outer space, the go-back-where-you-came-from kind, dusty goggles and all, who knows not what it means to keep a positive outlook as he keeps torturing the asphalt and grinding the air all day every day, day in and day out, going home all vibrating lying in bed vibrating all night getting up in the morning all vibrating going to the strip of asphalt beneath my window, the window to my soul jammed at an odd angle inside my eyes without an explanation for why the formerly spheroidal green world has become slanted and flattened and parched
The future belongs to us, he says. Happy to report that it’s dead quiet in the eye of the storm. The vitreous fluid has silted up, what’s left of the topsoil is buried under massive fields of concrete, the sun sets below the vast conspiracy of planetary forest fires, while the cute humanoids are watching from the smoldering couch. Today’s words brought to you by charred koala bears caught in the inferno while yesterday’s blather belongs to the bats who dropped dead from their perch in killer heatwaves. Bonus for the squeamish: spiders and insects are vanishing, too. More room for the children of the Anthropocene
Keep a positive outlook, he says, campaign consultants sloshing around, starched uniforms endorse a creeping worldwide coup, smoke’s drifting along the street, rubber bullets flying, aimed at people’s eyes. Close by, a beefy hand is placing an opposable thumb on one of mine. Are you gonna do the right thing? The right thing? I stammer. Best I can do is misspell despair. Wrong answer. Are you gonna do the right thing? Thumb hooking. Okay, okay, I rasp, I don’t wanna go blind, I’ll take my words back — what’s an eye or two between friends — I’ve got no argument with the alphabet soup. I’m tossing out the rusty old keys, sticking to passwords from here on out, clicking yes to all terms and conditions, happy to realign myself with you all
Here’s a vial of artificial tears if it gets too gritty for you. Nothing to see in the dark anyway. Whether it’s my bashed retinas or the sun refusing to get up in the morning, the end result is roughly the same. I’m free to go, free to negotiate my insurance plan with the hurricanes and twisters and dust storms. It’s all good, promise, say the agents and brokers and the sales reps, you just gotta learn to play nice with the howling pain
Maybe it’s the end, maybe not. Maybe I’m done for. All gone
