( via / via )

The wrong Amazon.

Meanwhile there's kind of a tense pressure toward resuming the appearance of normalcy, visible in mass media ("the Holidays" clutched like a life preserver; consuming, in general) & individual behavior (avoiding all but the purely trivial)--which seems, after a long diet of apocalyptic warnings, hollow to the point of absurdity. Sort of like: the Titanic hits an iceberg, sinks, & we swim ashore, whereupon we set up shop on the edge of another iceberg, & pretend nothing happened.

Patchwork sky.

restless, exasperated with my choices
of what to read, to sink my mind into,
some tale not fanciful but prone to joy
unforced, & not on conquests bent but truces;

beginning, as all this must, in mere confusion
then ramifying, fraught with other chores:
allies not idiots, against pursuers
of valid aims, not stooges of erosion;

a tale to give me food for thought beyond
unravelling a plot, & all that jazz:
description of new things & em'rald Oz
spectacles that isn't castle sand...

even a book i might have read long since
but this time turns out widdershins & shocks me.

What Counts.