The Rest of Your Life

 You have a form of dementia, you have your country’s disease, you reach for something and you can’t remember what it was you were reaching for, you buy a product and a mountain explodes, you flip a switch in your home and you stare at the switch, you can’t remember what you had in mind, but you look in the window and the horizon is shifting, a downward wave of trees and animal life, an eco-system turned into a thousand screams. You stare at your fingers. What happened? What was that sound? You can’t remember. You have the disease that was assigned to you.

You reach for something in your room and you can’t remember what it was you were reaching for even as you reach for it, you are reaching for a mountain, you are about to put a mountain in your micro-wave, you are in your kitchen, you are the big sad all-powerful American, the New Yorker, you are entitled to have your way with the energy around you, you are eternally confident, but you have forgotten why.

You have your country’s disease, parts of your body want to multiply, you are cancerous, you have yellow bulldozers multiplying in your blood, you have coal trucks pounding on the roads of your muscles, you are standing in your home in the city of New York, you have your country’s disease, it feels good, you are warm in your home in the winter, you are cool in the summer, the market is up today, investors have a new confidence.

Suddenly you remember, you remember it all. The wave of mountain life is looking up at you from the electric switch in the wall. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The animals flee along the ridges of skin in your fingertips… You stare at you hand. Will you flip that switch in the wall ever again? You stop in the middle of your New York apartment. There is a birdsong faintly coming through the wall from the city outside. The Earth has come to you, the Earth has found you here, crossing a thousand membranes and borders that were supposed to keep it out in the distance of little photos in brochures, on screens behind celebrities, the distant places the Earth was pushed as America became powerful.

You stop and take one step. The Earth is rising in your body like an electric storm. You are receiving the immunity to your country’s disease. That is no longer your burden. You are aware that everything has changed now. You will fight for the life of the Earth for the rest of your own life.