Emergency Measures

I don't know about you

But I am incredulous

Special arrangements ostensibly designed

To mitigate the effects of a rare and terrible disaster

Become standard procedure overnight, and stay that way

Long after the threat is reported to have subsided

For now, though there are definitely others on the way

Humans can quickly adapt to outrageous strangeness

They can grind their teeth quietly through the total disintegration

Of a familiar and occasionally delightful way of being

And its replacement by a fresh and unpleasant swarm

Of conventions and procedures and fresh jargon

That fits about as well as a polyester uniform

The inhabitant of such a uniform matters little

If you have a certain altitude's attitude

Said human being is a cipher, a simulacrum, a copy

Without an original--not especially real, you know?

One flyer in the windshield wiper of one vehicle among many

If that one is ignored or balled up and hurled at the basket

Only to ricochet into the anonymous ignominy of the parking lot

No real crisis has occurred

We need plenty of flyers, sure

Do we pause to reflect about the uniquely preposterous career of this one?

No

We must all get used to this for our safety

From one another

From life itself, really

The greatest danger comes from the other humans

Be wary of them

Potential carriers, all of them

See them as characters, while you alone are real

Understand, of course, that you are one of them

You are a non-player character in every other game

But yours

Lots of charming talk will be used

To persuade you that you are seen, that you have dignity

And that your dignity makes you worthy of respect

When phrases become clichés

Recognize them as ghosts

Rising from the corpse of an idea

"I see you; I feel seen; I want to feel seen; I don't feel seen!"

Seeing you is the least of it

A simple courtesy, really

One does not merely see a poem

One reads it

One seeks to understand and appreciate it

Not just for pleasure

Though there is that

When someone writes something just the way you hoped they would

And then does something that you did not expect, but believe was

Necessary, inevitable, the exhalation after the inhalation

When you see why they caught a thought in just those syllables

Or allowed a character to speak, without playing the ventriloquist

Or described that mundane, boring thing or person or place or idea in that odd way

Allowing you to look again, and scold yourself for missing that before

Yes, those leaves are gossiping with the wind

Yes, "Fuck!" is exactly what an intelligent, eloquent person would exclaim

When the Weltschmerz opened wide and gobbled her up

I'm so grateful that you wrote that, just that way

I understand your art, and love it

It closes the distance

It is older than any emergency

It has cruised through every crisis known to human beings

We can come to know and understand one another

We can imagine our way into the minds and lives

Of other "people" who are mere figments of our imagination

Swirling like sea monkeys in a tepid aquarium

Just because an author made them up

We can have long, passionate, frothy arguments about what a character would do or say or think under meticulously constructed, hypothetical conditions:

"Wolverine would not use his claws to carve a turkey!"

"Heathcliff would not have benefitted from SSRIs!"

"Odysseus was a slut on the road, no question about it, but his love for Penelope was passionate and sincere; need I remind you that he refused immortality twice to return to her waiting arms?"

Recall, these are just sets of symbols someone else made from scratch

The language that was handy at the time

Fiction, we can weep and bellow and rend our garments over

What about our neighbors?

What about the humans we work with?

What about our lovers?

What about our spouses?

What about our parents?

What about our children?

What about the person who brought you that panini--what sort of person has a panini delivered, using an app? Is this your life?

Generic discourse: slogans, cliches, general instructions

Muster point protocol

Form letters

Everything artificial intelligence creates

They are not for someone with a rich and complex inner life

They are for the great unwashed, the hoi polloi, the herd

The crowd in its itchy, uncomfortable polyester

With the name tag and the logo

Just to emphasize the doling out of dignity and respect

Of course, the herd is just the set of all the animals

The other characters

Who are also non-player characters

Until they cease merely to be seen

And are known

And understood

And in some form or fashion, loved

dignity (n.)

c. 1200, "state of being worthy," from Old French dignite "dignity, privilege, honor," from Latin dignitatem (nominative dignitas) "worthiness," from dignus "worth (n.), worthy, proper, fitting," from PIE *dek-no-, suffixed form of root *dek- "to take, accept."

From c. 1300 as "an elevated office, civil or ecclesiastical," also "honorable place or elevated rank." From late 14c. as "gravity of countenance."

Worthy of what?

Being treated like a background character who could become

A protagonist without warning

An extra to the dim, uncomprehending eyes of the great unwashed

But when at home, the universe trying to comprehend itself

As it tries to remember why it walked into the kitchen

With a book

The now is not then

And one, precious thing

Stolen by the plague

There is no greedier, more reckless thief, by the way

Was social proximity

No one escapes alive from this, our life

Find out what the game is like

For that random character in the background

Who's the most interesting person

You have never met

He saved a village from a dragon on Thursday

She has got to figure out a way to confess that she does not want to see him again

They are tired of being asked what they are called

Life is contagious

You've already got all of the standard symptoms

But you are experiencing them as only you can

What's that like?