We Are Dying

old age sticks

up Keep
Off
signs)&

youth yanks them
down(old
age
cries No

Tres)&(pas)
youth laughs
(sing
old age

scolds Forbid
den Stop
Must
n’t Don’t

&)youth goes
right on
gr
owing old

―“Old age sticks” by E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)

********

Dear Kate,

In a Godless world, people don't get blessed, they get lucky.

When we pray, we pray to our luck: "Thank God for this big warm meal, our secure home, comfortable life, for we know how unlucky some other people are in some other part of this world..."

Not that we don't believe in fairness, but in real life luck can't and doesn't need to be fair to everybody (or else why would it be called "luck"?), as long as it is fair to me.  I can't have a perfect world, only one good enough for me.

We pray hard too, for we know our luck is soon to run out.  The young will become old, healthy sick, living dying.  Suddenly, perhaps.  More possible if we pray not hard enough.

"Thy will be done," we pray to Fate (another name for our good god Luck), "with our hands as it is in our head"; another day we plan on doing just that, running against the direction Luck running out of us.

We can't stop running so long as Fate doesn't, Gump aiming for the precipice.

We can be sitting in our couch flipping through flippancy but our heart is pounding, exhausting us, seeing how Fate takes over despite our prayerful commitment to make life work.  Life doesn't work, that's the message we get from the news, fast food/car/love commercials, another choice of shampoo for our bustling head busting with ache, and let's do something about that.  If life works, we wouldn't be sitting on the fuckin' couch being told our best efforts are being fucked over, repeatedly and most assuredly eventually.

"We are dying, Richard Parker," Pi says to his tiger friend.

Yours, Alex