The Glory of Now
In one eye, a collage of Florida man headlines
Like “Florida Man Arrested for Practicing
Karate on Swans,” and, in the other, an old student
with whom I haven’t spoken for years fearing
a mutual acquaintance to whom I haven’t spoken
for even more years might be a suicide risk.
On the TV, a bad remake of an old bad movie.
In the middle, the screen this poem inhabits.
None of them know how often I minimize the others.
Meanwhile, everywhere someone seems unaware that
they’re abusing something. I’m unsure of my crime
but no doubt I must be committing one.
Everything untainted has been measured into glasses
and used to play a symphony with silverware.
There is a video on YouTube. It plays after the one
about central African violence but before the one
about the information paradox. Giving the world
a voice allows your urgency to fail to become viral.
It’s okay though. We can help each other remotely
in ways we’d never before imagined. White masks
on elastic bands and non-latex hypoallergenic gloves
become wholly unnecessary once we fully abstract
human assistance. After all, binary is of one and not one.
We don’t even need to make eye contact.
Compassion feels the same in your hand as click bait
and a link to pornography. They’re all forms of instant
gratification anyway and now we can elate ourselves
by consoling a thousand in spirit in the time it once took
to seek out a single wounded soul so that we don’t
have to build a relationship. Take comfort though;
Somewhere, there still remains someone without
a screen to bellow through. They don’t know
wires or signals or contact. Maybe they live
in a place where dust coats the cookware,
one must hike more than a mile to wait in a line for water
and you never stop hearing the buzz of insects.
Maybe they brew teas from local flowers,
spend their evenings mending jackets
with three different sizes of needle jutting
between pursed lips, and they spend hours
in a creaking porch rocker, envisioning
better fences and the fortunes they will bring.
It could be they were born with three fingers
on their right hand and the thought of that malformed
hand on the side of a breast disgusted their mother
out of nursing them, and this left them prone
to newborn maladies that pressed their fingerprints
into all the early phases of their development.
I’m letting myself get carried away with it, I know,
as I pour a coffee and search for clean spoons
and a conscience just dirty enough to be human.
I can’t even say for sure that I’ve helped myself lately
or that I’ve lived anything more than yesterday’s script,
but right now the kids and my wife are asleep.
I check on them and their night lights and find that
blankets rise and fall here and anywhere I look
from the windows. Down at the bottom of the hill
lived the woman who tried to run her family over
with her SUV over some trivial domestic squabble
before she barricaded the home against the police.
I thought I saw sugar in the cabinet the other day.
Now, now I am uncertain, and there is no doubt
that the glue traps in the basement are full.
The movie hasn’t stopped. New headlines are in.
No one has died nor are they the wiser. Already,
on the counter, my forgotten drink, somehow, my thirst too.
Andrew Najberg is the author of The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (forthcoming, Finishing Line Press March 2021) and Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press 2008). His poems have appeared in North American Review, Louisville Review, Mockingheart Review, Faultline Journal, Bangalore Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other journals and anthologies.