On Quitting

I don’t know that I can comment on any given apocalypse,
But I'm confident the dystopia is here.

It ended up being simple, we’ll kick ourselves
For not seeing it coming. Sooner.

Continuation. That’s the dystopia. The never
Ending is the grayscale nightmare, is the never waking up.

“Onward” is a motivational direction given the same way that a
Cyanide pill is an antacid tablet.
The NBA basketball analyst begins the sentence with a chortle,
The sound of a brick against a pane, then an itinerary of missed time,
Then cataloguing of missing inventory, absconded labor:

Well Doris and to all the viewers at home, that’s what happens when you miss 11 consecutive games due to coronavirus, you

Continue. Like the ballplayer. Like the carpenter ant. Like the flood.
Like the robber baron. Like the love that levees the neighborhood.

Like the sentence. 

I don’t know that change is the only constant as much as the only
Thing we routinely recognize as both everywhere and always, are endings.
And the only good part about endings are the beginnings they birth, so why focus on anything but the wide-mouthed delta?
The watery equilibrium? The difference? 

Last year we began no fewer than 300,000 times
And we ended so, so many more.
This year we are focusing even more on beginning,
And again, have lost track of all the ends,
Have abandoned trying to ever know the grief of stillness. 

Growing up my mother would often tell my brother and I to
Go somewhere and sit down boy
And I genuinely ask: what could be more liberating
Than your mother telling you to spread yourself wide like dandelion,
To plant your big toe in the earth like of course you are entitled to its nutrients,
To have her turn her back to you and know that when she returned you would be there,
Sitting and humming a song in the sunlight for no good reason at all?