Twelve Steps Through Paralytic Existential Depressive Dread

Twelve Steps Through Paralytic Existential Depressive  Dread 

1.         Count up the years spent and the years left to go

                  Reflect on what you have done and what you do not yet know

2.        Feel that little scratchy bump on your back and 

    Wonder if in that innocent persistence lay your final act

3.        Wake from that dream when they’re lowering you and

     Ponder -peace in soft cool earth as your soul flew

4.         Watch the children thin faced and wide eyed silent or screaming 

    Shudder at screens and papers and your impotence beaming

5.        Recall history- bodies swinging from those trees – crematorium – litany 

    Shiver at the same implacable hatred appearing on ceaselessly

6.         Fall back into the arms of your family, the sweet embrace forever lovingly 

            Remember reading poems to still bodies from podiums in chapels with people fuzzy

7.         Sit in stillness and listen to your blood thrum in your ears as on play lows and great highs

    Massage icy fingers on your trembling thighs 

8.        Breathe in to a count and out again in jagged uncertain puff puff after puff 

    Until it is all for heaven's sake enough, enough and enough!  

   Review counting the years spent and the years left to go - 

    Reflect on what you have done and what you do not yet know

9.  See the falling, screaming bodies, of innocents and evil-doers, guns, scythes, knives, lies, pollution, disinterest, genocide, war, failure to protect, rotting limbs of trees and testimony, rising seas and seizures of plague, creatures innocent curling in natural habitats as corporate jaws approach, see the birds fly in a murmuration of  color, watch the snow still sparkle on the highest crest, see the falling, the rising, the killing, the birthing of all creatures in all places on and on and on in brilliant racing images falling one into another piling on another and another and still not quite done -

Know that it shall all end for you and for each and every one 

10. Feel the creepy descent of gray heaviness fall as a curtain on a final act three

11. Worry that that flicker light in the corner of your eye is the final flutter for thee

12. Sit in stillness …lips dry…heart pounding…mind racing through it all .. and just when you feel you cannot take another instant  - just when, just when, just when....

 

                             THEN.....

                            Intone  “Not Now!" 

Say it clearly and firm - step from the chaos, the dark and the gray 

into the hope of the light of life in movement on this a newly dawned day