{unformattable, that's what you are...}

see the trouble is that these prose poems are supposed to be not only justified, but justified to a specific margin, and I can't seem to do that here. do you see that? it's the world's smallest violin, playing just for me. here's a revision of the bird flu madness from a while back.

re-learning to pray

if panic attacks, which luckily – no – (once I did start to, several times have on the train but said no very firmly very internally, interiorly, and settled into basic agitation, reasonable anxiety,,,) if yes I would today have yes succumbed today on the train sniffling kid harrumphing throat-clearing suit so close the news last night, report on the Flu, not nausea chills week in bed but H5N1 pandemic potential killer avian flu. in-flu-en-za. not even yet at the tipping point, now only now transferable bird to bird or bird to human but deadly settling deep suddenly immediately in the lungs, even in birds the birds they cut open (dead) their lungs filled with fluid and blood. fluid and blood, the virus woman said, the virus man said on the TV. worse than 1918, worse than the Spanish flu, H5N1 waiting for the tipping point Emily says isn’t it amazing. isn’t it phenomenal, for the first time in the history of ever we are preparing for a virus that does not yet exist. waiting for it to evolve. the tipping point, when it makes that hairpin turn onto the evolutionary highway and starts human to human, no bird necessary.

some things they said. her uncle now elderly sat in 1918 in the window of the family’s living room forbidden to leave the house for any reason counting hearses. a tally on a pad in his lap. counting hearses, a special column for his schoolmates. hospital man saying these showers, this emergency room, this is State-of-the-Art, here we could decontaminate 60 people an hour. and in an emergency ( disaster ) we could move faster. but that’s for the Nuclear Detonation In A Major Metropolitan Area portion of our broadcast. now, the man says H5N1 we’d run out of coffins in three days. stadiums full of cots full of the dying. first, Asia. first, countries that can’t afford the vaccine we don’t yet quite have perfected. guy on a plane, the plane, the airport, the city, New York City, the subway train, here, this train car, but not yet, not yet the tipping point. not yet a vaccine, or rather we have a vaccine it has to be made by hand inside eggs. inside eggs! each vaccine. little embryo vaccine for maybe a dozen people. New York City! thirty people this traincar alone. a tally. 1918. makes SARS look like the chicken pox. in case of an earthquake, stand against an interior wall away from windows. in case of a nuclear attack, all not immediately disintegrated strip, scrub down with water and soap, duct tape plastic over the windows, wait. tipping point. Oh lord, my god, I pray that these things never end. The sand and the seed, the rush of the water, the crash of the heavens. The prayer of men.