There is a cardinal warm
red against the sparkling
white snow falling softly.
And he gives me hope,
like the little red cardinal
of my Daddy’s childhood,
who must have followed
Dad all the granddaddy’s
fields’ way, farm to town,
country to hospital, determined
to give the little child’s faith
a lift over his scarlet fever.
Honestly, I didn’t really want
to leave after being seen,
but swathed in cotton paper
thin skin, and absent any
accompanying friend,
I felt powerless to stay,
vulnerable, naked, afraid,
especially without wine’s
numbing, warmly comforting,
sparkling glow of social charm,
the kind I didn’t have to put on,
also the kind there’s no filter on,
not to mention the kind decidedly
done.
So instead, isolating alone,
mocktailing and hiding shyly
behind my phone, anxiety
spiked my mind and laced
my awkwardly constructed
smile when approached
by well-meaning community
blinded to my overwhelming
self-judgment, self-consciously
directing encounters to mirror
me: forced, fearful, and fake.
Social living without libations’
lubricants can sometimes really
chafe.
It can be no demonstrable secret
that our collective global anxiety
is growing detrimental to humanity,
that sum total of a being of living
singularities, the consciousness
of which has tuned its frequency
to an information oversaturation
no longer buffered by medication
or meditation. There can be
only one remedy for this.
Redefibrillate